GO /RONG 



r M. OVERTON 







Copyrightls^ 



:0 



CDEXRIGHT DEPOSm 




WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG 

AND 

OTHER EXPLANATIONS 



WHY AUTHORS 
GO WRONG 

AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS 

BY 

GRANT M. OVERTON 

AUTHOR OF "THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS" 




NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 
1919 



4& K 



Copyright, igio, 

BY 

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 



SEP 26 19f9 



'CU529968 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Why Authors Go Wrong .... i 

II. A Barbaric Yawp 25 

III. In the Critical Court 39 

IV. Book "Reviewing" 51 

V. Literary Editors, by One of Them . 103 

VI. What Every Publisher Knows . . 119 

VII. The Secret of the Best Seller . . 145 

VIII. Writing a Novel 173 



WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG 

AND 

OTHER EXPLANATIONS 



WHY AUTHORS GO 
WRONG 

AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS 



WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG 

THE subject of Why Authors Go Wrong is one 
to answering which a book might adequately 
be devoted and perhaps we shall write a book about 
it one of these days, but not now. When, as and 
if written the book dealing with the question will 
necessarily show the misleading nature of Mr. 
Arnold Bennett's title, The Truth About an 
Author — a readable little volume which does not 
tell the truth about an author in general, but only 
what we are politely requested to accept as the truth 
about Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett may or 
may not be telling the truth about himself in that 
book; his regard for the truth in respect of the 
characters of his fiction has been variable. Perhaps 
he is more scrupulous when it comes to himself, but 
we are at liberty to doubt it. For a man who will 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



occasionally paint other persons — even fictionary 
persons — as worse than they really are may not 
unnaturally be expected to depict himself as some- 
what better than he is. 

We must not stay with Mr. Bennett any longer 
just now. It is enough that he has not been content 
to wait for the curtain to rise and has insisted on 
thrusting himself into our prologue. Exit; and let 
us get back where we were. 

We were indicating that Why Authors Go Wrong 
is an extensive subject. It is so extensive because 
there are many authors and many, many more 
readers. It is extensive because it is a moral and 
not a literary question, a human and not an artistic 
problem. It is extensive because it is really un- 
answerable and anything that is essentially unan- 
swerable necessitates prolonged efforts to answer it, 
this on the well known theory that it is better that 
many be bored than that a few remain dissatisfied. 



Let us take up these considerations one by one. 

It seems unlikely that any one will misunderstand 
the precise subject itself. What, exactly, is meant 
by an author "going wrong"? The familiar eu- 
phemism, as perhaps most frequently used, is any- 
thing but ambiguous. Ambiguous-sounding words 
are generally fraught with a deadly and specific 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



meaning — another illustration of the eternal para- 
dox of sound and sense. 

But as used in the instance of an author, "going 
wrong" has a great variety of meanings. An au- 
thor has gone wrong, for example, when he has 
deliberately done work under his best; he has gone 
wrong when he has written for sentimental or aes- 
thetic reasons and not, as he should, for money 
primarily ; he has gone wrong when he tries to uplift 
or educate his readers ; he has gone wrong when he 
has written too many books, or has not written 
enough books, or has written too fast or not fast 
enough, or has written what he saw and not what 
he felt, or what he felt and not what he saw, or 
posed in any fashion whatsoever. 

Ezra Pound, for example, has gone atrociously 
wrong by becoming a French Decadent instead of 
remaining a son of Idaho and growing up to be an 
American. Of course as a French Decadent he will 
always be a failure; as Benjamin De Casseres 
puts it, "the reality underlying his exquisite art is 
bourgeois and American. He is a ghost material- 
ized by cunning effects of lights and mirrors." 



Mr. Robert W. Chambers went wrong in an en- 
tirely different fashion. The usual charge brought 
against Mr. Chambers is that he consented to do 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



less than his best because it profited him. This is 
entirely untrue. Mr. Chambers's one mistake was 
that he did not write to make money. Every 
writer should, because writing is a business and a 
business is something which can only be decently 
conducted with that end in view. Fancy a real 
estate business which should not be conducted to 
make money! We should have to stop it imme- 
diately. It would be a menace to the community, 
for there is no telling what wickedness of purpose 
might lie behind it. A business not conducted pri- 
marily to make money is not a business but a blind ; 
and very likely a cover for operations of a criminal 
character. The safety of mankind lies in knowing 
motives and is imperilled by any enterprise that 
disguises them. 

And so for Mr. Chambers to refrain deliberately 
from writing to make money was a very wrong 
thing for him to do. Far from having a wicked 
motive, he had a highly creditable motive, which 
does not excuse him in the least. His praiseworthy 
purpose was to write the best that was in him for 
the sake of giving pleasure to the widest possible 
number of his readers. There does not seem to be 
much doubt that he has done it; those who most 
disapprove of him will hardly deny that the vast 
sales of his half a hundred stories are incontestable 
evidence of his success in his aim. But what is 
the result? On every hand he is misjudged and con- 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



demned. He is accused of acting on the right 
motive, which is called wrong! He is not blamed, 
as he should be, for acting on a wrong motive, which 
would, if understood, have been called right! What 
he should have done, of course, was to write sanely 
and consistently to make money, as did Amelia Barr. 
Mrs. Barr was not a victim of widespread contem- 
porary injustice and Mr. Chambers is and will 
remain so. 

Take another illustration — Mr. Winston Church- 
ill. One of the ablest living American novelists, 
he has gone so wrong that it cannot honestly be sup- 
posed he will ever go right again. His earlier novels 
were not only delightful but actually important. His 
later novels are intolerable. In such a novel as The 
Inside of the Cup Mr. Churchill is not writing with 
the honorable and matter-of-course object of selling 
a large number of copies and getting an income from 
them; he is writing with the dishonorable and un- 
avowed object of setting certain ideas before you, 
the contemplation of which will, in his opinion, do 
you good. He wants you to think about the horror 
of a clergyman in leading strings to his wealthiest 
parishioner. As a fact, there is no horror in such 
a situation and Mr. Churchill cannot conjure up any. 
There is no horror, there are only two fools. Now 
if a man is a fool, he's a fool; he cannot become 
anything else, least of all a sensible man. A clergy- 
man in thrall to a rich individual of his congrega- 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



tion is a fool ; and to picture him as painfully eman- 
cipating himself and becoming not only sensible but, 
as it were, heroic is to ask us to accept a contradic- 
tion in terms. For a fool is not a man who lacks 
sense, but a man who cannot acquire sense. Not 
even a miracle can make him sensible; if it could 
there would be no trouble with The Inside of the 
Cup, for a miracle, being, as G. K. Chesterton says, 
merely an exceptional occurrence, will always be 
acquiesced in by the intelligent reader. 



It would be possible to continue at great length 
giving examples of authors who have gone wrong 
and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they 
have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen 
authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If 
we are to accomplish any good end we must try to 
find out why they have allowed themselves to be de- 
ceived or betrayed and what can be done in the shape 
of rescue work or preventive effort in the future. 
Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide 
others aright. 

After a consideration of cases — we shall not clog 
the discussion with statistics and shall confine our- 
selves to general results — we have been led by all the 
evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble 
is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. In- 
deed, in the majority of cases the readers are the 
great and unyielding force making for sanity and 
virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral 
pressure exerted by their readers many, many more 
authors would certainly stray from the path of busi- 
ness rectitude — not literary rectitude, for there is no 
such thing. What is humanly right is right in 
letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in 
the world. 

The commonest way in which authors go wrong 
is one already stated : By ceasing to write primarily 
for money, for a living and as much more as may 
come the writer's way. The commonest reason why 
authors go wrong in this way is comical — or would 
be if it were not so common. They feel ashamed to 
write for money first and last ; they are seized with 
an absurd idea that there is something implicitly dis- 
graceful in acting upon such a motive. And so to 
avoid something that they falsely imagine to be dis- 
graceful they do something that they know is dis- 
graceful; they write from some other motive and let 
the reader innocently think they are writing with the 
old and normal and honorable motive. 

So widespread is this delusion that it is abso- 
lutely necessary to digress for a moment and explain 
why writing to make money is respectable ! Why is 
anything respectable? Because it meets a human 
necessity and meets it in an open and aboveboard 



8 Why Authors Go Wrong 

fashion without detriment to society in general or 
the individual in particular. All lawful business 
conforms to this definition and writing for money 
certainly does. Writing — or painting or sculptur- 
ing or anything else — not done to make money is 
not respectable because ( i ) it meets no human ne- 
cessity, (2) it is not done openly and aboveboard, 
(3) it is invariably detrimental to society, and (4) 
it is nearly always harmful to individuals, and most 
harmful to the individual engaged upon it. 

It is useless to say that a man who writes or 
paints or carves for something other than money 
meets a human necessity — a spiritual thirst for 
beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for 
beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work 
done for an adequate and monetary reward. And 
to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful with- 
out requiring a proper price is to demoralize society 
by showing men that they can have something for 
nothing. 



Now it is just here that the moral pressure of the 
great body of readers is felt, a pressure that is 
constantly misunderstood by the author. So surely 
as the writer has turned from writing to make 
money and has taken up writing for art's sake 
(whatever that means) or writing for some ethical 
purpose or writing in the interest of some propa- 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



ganda, though it be merely the propaganda of his 
own poor, single intellect — just so surely as he has 
done this his readers find him out. Whether they 
then continue to read him or not depends entirely on 
what they think of his new and unavowed (but 
patent) motive. Of course readers ought to be 
stern ; having caught their author in a wrong motive 
they ought to punish him by deserting him instantly. 
But readers are human; they are even surprising- 
ly selfish at times; they are capable of considering 
their own enjoyment, and, dreadful to say, they are 
capable of considering it first. So if, as in the case 
of Mr. Chambers, they find his new motive friendly 
and flattering they read him more than ever ; on the 
other hand, if they find the changed purpose dis- 
agreeable or tiresome, aiming to uplift them or to 
shock them unpleasantly or (sometimes) to make 
fun of them, they quit that author cold. And they 
hardly ever come back. Usually the author is not 
perspicacious enough to grasp the cause of the de- 
fection; it is amazing how seldom authors think 
there can be anything wrong with themselves. Usu- 
ally the abandoned author goes right over and joins 
a small sect of highbrows and proclaims the deplor- 
able state of his national literature. "The public 
be damned !" he says in effect, but the public is not 
damned, it is he that is damned, and the public has 
done its utmost to save him. 

Sometimes an author deliberately does work that 



io Why Authors Go Wrong 

is less than his best, but he never does this with the 
idea of making money, or, if he entertains that idea, 
he fools no one but himself. There are known and 
even (we believe) recorded instances of an author 
ridiculing his own output and avowing with what 
he probably thought audacious candor : "Of course, 
this latest story of mine is junk — but it'll sell ioo,- 
ooo copies !" 

It never does. The author is perfectly truthful 
in describing the book as worthless. If he implies 
as he always will in such a case that he deliberately 
did less than his best he is an unconscious liar. It 
was his best and its worthlessness was solely the re- 
sult of his total insincerity. For a man or woman 
may write a very bad book and write it with an ut- 
ter sincerity that will sell hundreds of thousands of 
copies ; but no one can write a very fine book insin- 
cerely and have it sell. 

The author who thinks that he has written a 
rather inferior novel for the sake of huge royalties 
has actually written the best he has in him, namely, 
a piece of cheese. The author who has actually 
written beneath his best has not done it for money, 
but to avoid making money. He thinks it is his 
best; he thinks it is something utterly artistic, 
aesthetically wonderful, highbrowedly pure, lofty and 
serene; he scorns money; to make money by it 
would be to soil it. What he cannot see is that it 
is not his best ; that it is very likely quite his worst ; 



Why Authors Go Wrong u 

that when he has done his best he will unavoidably 
make money unless, like the misguided mortal we 
have just mentioned, deep insincerity vitiates his 
work. 

We are therefore ready, before going further, to 
formulate certain paradoxical principles governing 
all literary work. 



To understand why authors go wrong we must 
first understand how authors may go right. The 
paradoxical rules which if observed will hold the 
author to the path of virtue and rectitude may be 
formulated briefly as follows : 

i. An author must write to make money first of 
all, and every other purpose must be secondary to 
this purpose of money making. 

The paradoxy inherent in this principle is that 
while writing the author must never for a single 
moment think of the money he may make. 

2. Every writer must have a stern and insistent 
moral purpose in his writing, and especially must he 
be animated by this purpose if he is writing fiction. 

The paradoxy here is that never, under any cir- 
cumstances, may the writer exhibit his moral pur- 
pose in his work. 

3. A writer must not write too much nor must 
he write too little. He is writing too much if his 



12 Why Authors Go Wrong 

successive books sell better and better; he is writ- 
ing too little if each book shows declining sales. 

This may appear paradoxical, but consider: If 
the writer's work is selling with accelerated speed 
the market for his wares will very quickly be over- 
supplied. This happened to Mr. Kipling one day. 
He had the wisdom to stop writing almost entirely, 
to let his production fall to an attenuated trickle; 
with the result that saturation was avoided, and 
there is now and will long continue to be a good, 
brisk, steady demand for his product 

On the other hand, consider the case of Mrs. 
Blank (the reader will not expect us to be either 
so ungallant or so professionally unethical or so 
commercially unfair as to give her name). Mrs. 
Blank wrote a book every two or three years, and 
each was more of a plug than its predecessor. She 
began writing a book a year, and the third volume 
under her altered schedule was a best seller. It was 
also her best novel. 



Then why? why? why? do the authors go wrong? 
Because, if we must say it in plain English, they 
disregard every principle of successful authorship. 
When they have written a book or two and have 
made money they get it into their heads that it is 
ignoble to write for money and they try to write 



Why Authors Go Wrong 13 

for something else — for Art, usually. But it is im- 
possible to write for Art, for Art is not an end but 
a means. When they do not try to write for Art 
they try to write for an Ethical Purpose, but they 
exhibit it as inescapably as if the book were a pulpit 
and the reader were sitting in a pew. Indeed, some 
modern fiction cannot be read unless you are sitting 
in a pew, and a very stiff and straight backed pew 
at that ; not one of these old fashioned, roomy, high 
walled family pews such as Dickens let us sit in, 
pews in which one could be comfortable and easy 
and which held the whole family, pews in which 
you could box the children's ears lightly without 
doing it publicly; no! the pews the novelists make 
us sit in these days are these confounded modern 
pews which stop with a jab in the small of your 
back and which are no better than public benches, 
but are intensely more uncomfortable — pews iu 
which, to ease your misery, you can do nothing but 
look for the mote in your neighbor's eye and the 
wrong color in your neighbor's cravat. 

Because — to get back to the whys of the authors 
— -because when they are popular they overpopu- 
larize themselves, and when they are unpopular 
they lack the gumption to write more steadily and 
fight more gamely for recognition. We don't mean 
critical recognition, but popular recognition. How 
can an author expect the public, his public, any pub- 
lic, to go on swallowing him in increased amounts 



14 Why Authors Go Wrong 

at meals placed ever closer together — for any length 
of time? And how, equally, can an author expect a 
public, his public, or any public, to acquire a taste for 
his work when he serves them a sample once a week, 
then once a month, then once a year? Why, a per- 
son could not acquire a taste for olives that way. 

8 

We have no desire to be personal for the sake of 
being personal, but we have every desire to be per- 
sonal in this discussion for the sake of being im- 
personal, pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to 
take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative ex- 
ample of how not to write fiction. We shall take 
the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel, 
Virtuous Wives. 

Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and 
conventional censors of American literature of hav- 
ing written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alack- 
aday, no! If he had a much better book might 
have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was 
not thinking primarily of money, as he should have 
been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He 
was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had 
been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the 
lives led by some New York women — the kind Alice 
Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The partici- 
pation of America in the war had not begun. The 



Why Authors Go Wrong 15 

performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly 
conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel 
that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and 
worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans. 
He set to work. He finished his book. It was 
serialized in one of the several magazines which 
have displaced forever the old Sunday school library 
in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these 
forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris in- 
scribe our present day chronicles of the Schoenberg- 
Cotta family, and writ large over their instalments, 
as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression 
of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Pow- 
erfully, Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All 
Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate. 

Mr. Johnson's novel was printed serially and ap- 
peared then as a book with a solemn preface — the 
final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself, 
of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is 
failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is 
selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make 
money out of it — which is what he did not want. 
What he did want he made impossible when he un- 
masked his great aim. 

The world may be perverse, but you have to take 
it as it is. The world may be childish, but none 
of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks 
you write with the honest and understandable ob- 
ject of making a living it attributes no ulterior mo- 



1 6 Why Authors Go Wrong 

tive to you. The world says: "John Smith, the 
butcher, sells me beeksteak in order to buy Mrs. 
Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes." The 
world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if 
John Smith tells the world and his wife every time 
they come to his shop : "I am selling you this large, 
juicy steak to give you good red blood and make 
you Fit," then the world and his wife are resentful 
and say : "We think we don't like your large, juicy 
steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our 
own preferences. We will just go on down the 
street to the delicatessen — we mean the Liberty food 
shop — and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frank- 
furters, the well known Liberty sausage. To hell 
with the Kaiser!" And so John Smith merely 
makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large, 
juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how 
deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith 
is defeated in his real purpose. He does not fur- 
nish the world and his wife with the red corpuscles 
he yearned to give them. 



At this juncture we seem to hear exasperated 
cries of this character: "What do you mean by 
saying that an author must write for money first 
and last and yet must have a stern moral purpose? 
How can the two be reconciled? Why must he 



Why Authors Go Wrong 17 

think of money until he begins to write and never 
after he begins to write? We understand why the 
moral object must not obtrude itself, but why need 
it be there at all?" 

Can a man serve two masters? Can he serve 
money and morality? Foolish question No. 58,914! 
He not only can but he always does when his work 
is good. 

A painter — a good painter — is a man who burns 
to enrich the world with his work and is determined 
to make the world pay him decently for it. A 
good sculptor is a man who has gritted his teeth 
with a resolution to give the world certain beautiful 
figures for which the world must reward him — or 
he will know the reason why ! A good corset manu- 
facturer is a man who is filled with an almost holy 
yearning to make people more shapely and more 
comfortable than he found them — and he is fanati- 
cally resolved that they shall acknowledge his 
achievement by making him rich ! 

For that's the whole secret. How is a man to 
know that he has painted great portraits or land- 
scapes or carved lovely monuments or made thou- 
sands shapelier and more easeful if not by the money 
they paid him ? How is an author to know that he 
has amused or instructed thousands if not by the 
size of his royalty checks? By hearsay? By mind 
reading? By plucking the petals of a daisy — "They 
love me. They love me not" ? 



1 8 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Every man can and must serve two masters, but 
the one is the thing that masters him and the other 
is the evidence of his mastery. Every man must 
before beginning work fix his mind intently upon 
the making of money, the money which shall be 
an evidence of his mastery; every man on begin- 
ning work and for the duration of the work must 
fix his mind intently and exclusively on the service 
of morality, the great master whose slave he is in 
the execution of an Invisible Purpose. And no 
man dare let his moral purpose expose itself in his 
work, for to do that is to do a presumptuous and 
sacrilegious thing. The Great Moralizer, who has 
in his hands each little one of us workers, holds his 
Purpose invisible to us; how then can we venture 
to make visible what He keeps invisible, how can 
we have the audacity to practice a technique that 
He Himself does not employ ? 

For He made the world and all that is in it. 
And He made it with a moral end in view, as we 
most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pre- 
tends that that moral object is clearly visible. It 
does not disclose itself to us directly ; we are aware 
of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it for- 
evermore. If the world was so made, who are we 
that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him 
as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and 
to reveal what He hath hidden? 

There are those, of course, who see no moral ex- 



Why Authors Go Wrong 19 

planation of the universe; but they are not always 
consistent. There is that famous passage of 
Joseph Conrad's in which he declines the ethical 
view and says he would fondly regard the pano- 
rama of creation as pure spectacle — the marvellous 
spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself. 
And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper mani- 
festation and a more perfect concealment of his 
moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing 
to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the 
sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance — above 
all, the sense of fidelity — that exists in mankind. 
Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an 
inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows. 
This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the 
whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing 
cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which 
reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the pro- 
found pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in 
its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver 
of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nos- 
tromo. An immortal, Conrad, but not the admir- 
ing and passive spectator he diffidently declares 
himself to be! 



10 

Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not. 
It is no more possible to deal with all the authors 



20 Why Authors Go Wrong 

who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to 
repentance. But sin is primarily a question be- 
tween the sinner and his own conscience, and the 
errors of authors are invariably questions be- 
tween the authors and the public. The public is 
the best conscience many an author has; and the 
substitution of a private self -justification for a pub- 
lic vindication has seldom been a markedly suc- 
cessful undertaking in human history. Yet there 
is a class of writers for whom no public vindica- 
tion is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it; 
who set themselves up as little gods. They are 
the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who 
not only do not admit but who deliberately deny 
a moral purpose in anything; who think that a 
something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of 
existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be wor- 
shipped. It is a cult of Baal. 

For these Artists despise money, and in despis- 
ing money they cheapen themselves and become 
creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and 
reject it; immediately the world disappears: "And 
the earth was without form, and void." They de- 
moralize honest people with whom they come in 
contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but 
really workable standards which govern normal 
li ves — an d never replacing them. What is their 
Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beau- 
tiful. What is their Art? It is what each cold 



Why Authors Go Wrong 21 

little selfish soul among them chooses to call Art. 
What is their achievement? Self-destruction. 
They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral 
defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the 
lepers among the workers of the world. For them 
there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they 
deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of 
honest labor, the mystical humanity of man. 

Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing 
moment to the contemplation of the great body of 
men and women who labor cheerfully and honor- 
ably, if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make 
their living, to do good work and make the world 
pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the 
firm conviction that it has had a little the better 
of the bargain! These are the authors who "go 
wrong," and with whose well meant errors we have 
been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps 
not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word 
of advice we can give our authors? To be sure 
there is! When our authors are quite sure they 
will not go wrong, they may go write ! 



A BARBARIC YAWP 



II 



A BARBARIC YAWP 



IT was the handy phrase to describe Walt Whit- 
man: The "barbaric yawp." In its elegant 
inelegance the neatly adjectived noun was felt to 
be really brilliant. Stump speakers "made the 
eagle scream" ; a chap like Whitman had to be char- 
acterized handily too. 

The epigrammatic mind is the card index mind. 
Now the remarkable thing about the card index is 
its casualty list. People who card index things are 
people who proceed to forget those things. The 
same metal rod that transfixes the perforated cards 
pierces the indexers' brains. A mechanical device 
has been called into play. Brains are unnecessary 
any more. The day of pigeonholes was slightly 
better; for the pigeonholes were not unlike the 
human brain in which things are tucked away to- 
gether, because they really have some association 
with each other. But the card index alphabetizes 
ruthlessly. Fancy an alphabetical brain! 

Epigrams are like that. A man cannot take the 
trouble to think ; he falls back on an epigram. He 
cannot take the trouble to remember and so he 
card indexes. The upshot is that he can find 

25 



26 Why Authors Go Wrong 

nothing in the card index and of course has no 
recollection to fall back on. Or he recalls the epi- 
gram without having the slightest idea what it was 
meant to signify. 

But this is not to be about card indexes nor even 
about epigrams. It is to be a barbaric yawp, by 
which it is to be supposed was once meant the happy 
consciousness and the proud wonder that struck 
into the heart of an American poet. Whitman was 
not so much a poet as the chanteyman of Longfel- 
low's Ship of State. There was an hour when the 
chanteyman had an inspiration, when he saw as 
by an apocalyptic light all the people of these 
United States linked and joined in a common effort. 
Every man, woman and child of the millions tailed 
on the rope ; every one of them put his weight and 
muscle to the task. It was a tremendous hour. It 
was the hour of a common effort. It was the hour 
for which, Walt felt, men had risked their lives 
a century earlier. It was a revealed hour; it had 
not yet arrived; but it was sure to come. And in 
the glow of that revelation the singer lifted up his 
voice and sang. . . . God grant he may be hearing 
the mighty chorus ! 



America is not a land, but a people. And a 
people may have no land and still they will remain 



A Barbaric Yawp 2.7 

a people. There has, for years, been no country 
of Poland; but there are Poles. There has been 
a country of Russia for centuries, but there is 
to-day no Russian people. What makes a people? 
Not a land certainly. Not political forms nor 
political sovereignty. Not even political indepen- 
dence. Nor, for that matter, voices that pretend 
or aspire to speak the thoughts of a nation. 
Poland has had such voices and Russia has had 
her artists, musicians, novelists, poets. 

The thing that makes a people is a thing over 
which statesmen have no control. Geography 
throws no light on the subject. Nor does that 
study of the races of man which is called anthro- 
pology. It is not a psychological secret (psychol- 
ogy covers a multitude of guesses). Philosophy 
may evolve beautiful systems of thought, but sys- 
tems of thought have nothing to do with the par- 
ticular puzzle before us. 

The secret must be sought elsewhere. Is it an 
inherited thing, this thing that makes a people? 
That can't be; ours is a mixed inheritance here in 
America. Is it an abstract idea? Abstract ideas 
are never more than architectural pencillings and 
seldom harden into concrete foundations. Is it a 
common emotion? If it were we should be able 
to agree on a name for it. Is it an instinct? An 
instinct might be back of it. 

What is left? Can it be a religion? As such 



28 Why Authors Go Wrong 

it should be easily recognizable. But an element 
of religion? An act of faith? 

Yes, for faith may exist with or without a creed, 
and the act of faith may be deliberate or involun- 
tary. Willed or unwilled the faith is held ; formu- 
lated or unformulated the essential creed is there. 
Let us look at the people of America, men and 
women of very divergent types and tempers far 
apart; men and women of inextricable heredities 
and of confusing beliefs — even, ordinarily, of 
clashing purposes. Each believes a set of things, 
but the beliefs of them all can be reduced to a low- 
est common denominator, a belief in each other; just 
as the beliefs of them all have a highest common 
multiple, a willingness to die in defence of America. 
To some of them America means a past, to some 
the past has no meaning; to some of them America 
means a future, to others a future is without sig- 
nificance. But to all of them America means a 
present to be safeguarded at the cost of their lives, 
if need be; and the fact that the present is the 
translation of the past to some and the reading of 
the future to others is incidental. 



We would apply these considerations to the affair 
of literature; and having been tiresomely generaliz- 



A Barbaric Yawp 29 

ing we shall get down to cases that every one can 
understand. 

The point we have tried to make condenses to 
this : The present is supremely important to us all. 
To some of us it is all important because of the 
past, and to some of us it is of immense moment 
because of the future, and to the greatest number 
(probably) the present is of overshadowing con- 
cern because it is the present — the time when they 
count and make themselves count. It is now or 
never, as it always is in life, though the urgency 
of the hour is not always so apparent. 

It was now or never with the armies in the field, 
with the men training in the camps, with the coal 
miners, the shipbuilders, the food savers in the 
kitchens. It is just as much now or never with the 
poets, the novelists, the essayists — with the workers 
in every line, although they may not see so dis- 
tinctly the immediacy of the hour. Everybody 
saw the necessity of doing things to win the war; 
many can see the necessity of doing things that 
will constitute a sort of winning after the war. 
There is always something to be won. If it is not 
a war it is an after the war. "Peace hath its vic- 
tories no less renowned than war" is a fine sound- 
ing line customarily recited without the slightest 
recognition of its real meaning. The poet did 
not mean that the victories of peace were as greatly 
acclaimed as the victories of war, but that the sum 



30 Why Authors Go Wrong 

total of their renown was as great or greater be- 
cause they are more enduring. 



Now for the cases. 

It is the duty, the opportunity and the privilege 
of America now, in the present hour, to make it 
impossible hereafter for any one to raise such a 
question as Bliss Perry brings up in his book The 
American Spirit in Literature, namely, whether 
there is an independent American literature. Not 
only does Mr. Perry raise the question, but, stated 
as baldly as we have stated it, the query was there- 
upon discussed, with great seriousness, by a well- 
known American book review! We are happy 
to say that both Mr. Perry and the book re- 
view decided that there is such a thing as an 
American literature, and that American writing is 
not a mere adjunct (perhaps a caudal appendage) 
of English literature. All Americans will feel 
deeply gratified that they could honorably come to 
such a conclusion. But not all Americans will feel 
gratified that the conclusion was reached on the 
strength of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whit- 
tier, Holmes, Whitman, Poe and others of the im- 
mortal dead. Some Americans will wish with a 
faint and timid longing that the conclusion might 
have been reached, or at least sustained, on the 



A Barbaric Yawp * 31 

strength of Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Edith 
Wharton, Mary Johnston, Gertrude Atherton, 
Mary S. Watts, William Allen White, Edgar Lee 
Masters, Amy Lowell, Edna Ferber, Joseph 
Hergesheimer, Owen Wister and a dozen or so 
other living writers over whose relative importance 
as witnesses for the affirmative we have no desire 
to quarrel. Mr. Howells, we believe, was called 
to the stand. 

If we had not seen it we should refuse to credit 
our senses. The idea of any one holding court to- 
day to decide the question as to the existence of an 
independent American literature is incredibly 
funny. It is the peculiarity of criticism that any 
one can set up a court anywhere at any time for 
any purpose and with unlimited jurisdiction. 
There are no rules of procedure. There are no 
rules of evidence. There is no jury; the people 
who read books may sit packed in the court room, 
but there must be no interruptions. Order in the 
court! Usually the critic judge sits alone, but 
sometimes there are special sessions with a full 
bench. Writs are issued, subpoenas served, wit- 
nesses are called and testimony is taken. An in- 
junction may be applied for, either temporary or 
permanent. Nothing is easier than to be held in 
contempt. 



32 Why Authors Go Wrong 



The most striking peculiarity of procedure in the 
Critical Court is with regard to what constitutes 
evidence. You might, in the innocence of your 
heart, suppose that a man's writings would consti- 
tute the only admissible evidence. Not at all. His 
writings have really nothing to do with the case. 
What is his Purpose? If, as a sincere individual, 
he has anywhere exposed or stated his object in 
writing books counsel objects to the admission of 
this Purpose as evidence on the ground that it is 
incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial; and not 
sound Art. On the other hand if, as an artist, he 
has embodied his Purpose in his fiction so that 
every intelligent reader may discover it for himself 
and feel the glow of a personal discovery, counsel 
will object to the admission of his books as evi- 
dence on the ground that they are incompetent, ir- 
relevant and immaterial; and not the best proof. 
Counsel will demand that the man himself be ex- 
amined personally as to his purpose (if he is alive) 
or will demand a searching examination of his 
private life (if he be dead). The witness is 
always a culprit and browbeating the witness is 
always in order. I am a highbrow and you are a 
lowbrow; what the devil do you mean by writing 
a book anyway? 

Before the trial begins the critic-judge enunciates 



A Barbaric Yawp 33 

certain principles on which the verdict will be based 
and the verdict is based on those principles whether 
they find any application in the testimony or not. A 
favorite principle with the man on the bench is that 
all that is not obscure is not Art. It isn't phrased as 
intelligibly as that, to be sure ; a common way to put 
it is to lay down the rule that the popularity of a 
book (which means the extent to which it is under- 
stood and therefore appreciated) has nothing to do 
with the case, tra-la, has nothing to do with the 
case. Another principle is that sound can be 
greater than sense, which, in the lingo of the High- 
est Criticism, is the dictum that words and sen- 
tences can have a beauty apart from the meaning 
(if any) that they seek to convey. And there 
really is something in this idea; for example, what 
could be lovelier than the old line, "Eeny, meeny, 
miny-mo" ? Shakespeare, a commercial fellow 
who wrote plays for a living, knew this when he 
let one of his characters sing: 

"When that I was and a little tiny boy, 
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
A foolish thing was but a toy, 

For the rain it raineth every day." 

And a little earlier in Twelfth Night: 

"Like a mad lad, 
Pare thy nails, dad; 
Adieu, goodman devil." 



Why Authors Go Wrong 



Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without 
the least sense unless it hath the vulgarity to be 
looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright. 



But the strangest thing about the proceedings in 
the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary in- 
terest. Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here 
until it has been decided everywhere else. For the 
great decisions are the decisions of life and not de- 
cisions on the past. A man has written twenty 
books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration 
by the Critical Court. A man has written two 
novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The 
Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past 
all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic- 
judge that a young man who has written two 
novels is more important than a dead man who has 
written twenty novels. For the young man who 
has written two novels has some novels yet to be 
written; he can be helped, strengthened, encour- 
aged, advised, corrected, warned, counselled, re- 
buked, praised, blamed, presented with bills of par- 
ticulars, and — heartened. If he has not genius 
nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many 
things can be done to help him exploit it. And 
a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything 
you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance 



A Barbaric Yawp 35 

of shaping that writer's work and can no longer 
write a decree, only an epitaph. 

To be brutally frank : Nobody cares what the 
Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Long- 
fellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what 
Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, 
what the developments are in the William Allen 
White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, 
whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that 
contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. 
On these things depend the present era in American 
literature and the possibilities of the future. And 
these things are more or less under our control. 

The people of America not only believe that 
there is an independent American literature, but 
they believe that there will continue to be. Some 
of them believe in the past of that literature, some 
of them believe in its future; but all of them be- 
lieve in its present and its presence. Their voice 
may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the 
court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is 
heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction 
melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, 
where new biographies and historical works are 
bought daily and where books on all sorts of 
weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into 
the hands of customers. 

The voice of the American people is articulate in 
the offices of newspapers which deal with the news 



36 Why Authors Go Wrong 

of new books. It makes a seismographic record 
in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to 
almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment 
and commendation. What, do you suppose, a 
writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the 
Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it? 
She can reread hundreds and thousands of letters 
from men and women who tell her how profoundly 
her books have — tickled their fancy? pleased their 
love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to 
understand? No, merely how profoundly her 
books have altered their whole lives. 

Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical 
Court is in session. All who have business with 
the court draw near and give attention! 



IN THE [CRITICAL COURT 



Ill 

IN THE CRITICAL COURT 

r i 1HE Critical Court being in session, William 

JL Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C. 

Brownell, Wilson Folic tt and William Marion 

Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington, 

novelist, is called. 

Counsel for the Prosecution : If it please the 
court, this case should go over. The defendant, 
Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet. 

Mr. Howells : I do not know how my colleagues 
feel, but I have no objection to considering the 
work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive. 

Mr. Follett: I think it would be better if we 
deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until 
it is a little older. 

Counsel for the Defense (in this case Mr. 
Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarking- 
ton):"!?'? 

Mr. Follett : I mean his work, or works. Per- 
haps I should have said "them." 

Mr. Holliday: "They," not "them." Excep- 
tion. And "are" instead of "is." Gentlemen, I 

39 



4° Why Authors Go Wrong 



have no wish to prejudice the case for my client, 
but I must point out that if you wait until he is a 
little older he may be dead. 

Mr. Boynton: So much the better. We can 
then consider his works in their complete state and 
with reference to his entire life. 

Mr. Holliday : But it would then be impossible 
to give any assistance to Mr. Tarkington. The 
chance to influence his work would have passed. 

Mr. Brownell: That is relatively unimportant. 

Mr. Holliday: I beg pardon but Mr. Tarking- 
ton feels it rather important to him. 

Mr. Boynton : My dear Mr. Holliday, you really 
must remember that it is not what seems impor- 
tant to Mr. Tarkington that can count with us, 
but what is important in our eyes. 

Mr. Holliday: Self-importance. 

Mr. Boynton (stiMy) : Certainly not. Merely 
self-confidence. But on my own behalf I may say 
this : I am unwilling to consider Mr. Tarkington's 
works in this place at this time; but I am willing 
to pass judgment in an article for a newspaper or 
a monthly magazine or some other purely perish- 
able medium. That should be sufficient for Mr. 
Tarkington. 

Mr. Follett : I think the possibility of consider- 
ing Mr. Tarkington must be ruled out, anyway, as 
one or more of his so-called works have first ap- 
peared serially in the Saturday Evening Post. 



In the Critical Court 



Mr. Holliday (noting the effect of this revela- 
tion on the members of the court) : Very well, I 
will not insist. Booth, you will have to get along 
the best you can with newspaper and magazine re- 
views and with what people write to you or tell you 
face to face. Be brave, Tark, and do as you aren't 
done by. After all, a few million people read you and 
you make enough to live on. The court will pass 
on you after you are dead, and if you dictate any 
books on the ouija board the court's verdict may 
be helpful to you then; you might even manage the 
later Henry James manner. 

Clerk of the Court (Prof. William Lyon 
Phelps) : Next case! Mrs. Atherton please step 
forward ! 

Mrs. Atherton (advancing with composure) : I 
can find no one to act for me, so I will be my own 
counsel. I will say at the outset that I do not care 
for the court, individually or collectively, nor for 
its verdict, whatever it may be. 

Prof. Phelps: I must warn you that anything 
you say may, and probably will, be used against 
you. 

Mrs. Atherton : Oh, I don't mind that ; it's the 
things the members of the court have said against 
me that I purpose to use against them. 

Mr. Brownell: Are you, by any chance, refer- 
ring to me, Madam? 

Mrs. Atherton : I do not refer to persons, Mr. 



42 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Brownell. I hit them. No, I had Mr. Boynton 
particularly in mind. And perhaps Gene Stratton- 
Porter. Is she here? {Looks around menac- 
ingly). No. Well, go ahead with your nonsense. 

Mr. Howells {rising) : I think I will withdraw 
from consideration of this case. Mrs. Atherton 
has challenged me so often 

Mr. Boynton: No, stay. / am going to stick 
it out 

Mr. Follett: I think there is no question but 
that we should hold the defendant in contempt. 

Mrs. Atherton : Mutual, I assure you. {She 
sweeps out of the room and a large section of the 
public quietly follows her.) 

Clerk Phelps: Joseph Hergesheimer to the 
bar! {A short, stocky fellow with twinkling eyes 
steps forward.) Mr. Hergesheimer? 

Mr. Hergesheimer: Right. 

Mr. Reedy : Good boy, Joe ! 

Mr. Follett: It won't do, it won't do at all. 
There's only The Three Black Pennys and Gold and 
Iron and a novel called Java Head to go by. Sat- 
urday Evening Post. And bewilderingly unlike 
each other. Seem artistic but are too popular, I 
fancy, really to be sound. 

Mr. Hergesheimer: With all respect, I should 
like to ask whether this is a court of record? 

Mr. Howells: It is. 

Mr. Hergesheimer : In that case I think I shall 



In the Critical Court 43 

press for a verdict which may be very helpful to 
me. I should like also to have the members of the 
court on record respecting my work. 

Mr. Boynton: Just as I feared. My dear fel- 
low, while we should like to be helpful and will 
endeavor to give you advice to that end it must 
be done unobtrusively . . . current reviews . . . 
we'll compare your work with that of Hawthorne 
and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman. 
That will give you something to work for. But 
you cannot expect us to say anything definite about 
you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were 
to say what we really think, or what some really 
think, that you are the most promising writer in 
America to-day, promising in the sense that you 
have most of your work before you and in the 
sense that your work is both popular and artistically 
fine. Don't you see the risk? 

Mr. Hergesheimer : I do, and I also see that 
you would make your own reputation much more 
than you would make mine. I write a story. I 
risk everything with that story. You deliver a 
verdict. Why shouldn't you take a decent chance, 
too? 

Mr. Follett: Why should I take any more 
chances than I have to with my contemporaries ? I 
pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you. 

Mr. Hergesheimer: I shall write a novel to be 
published after my death. There was Henry 



44 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Adams. He stipulated that The Education of 
Henry Adams should not be published until after 
his death; and everybody says it is positively bril- 
liant. 

Mr. Follett (relieved) : That is a wise decision. 
But don't be disheartened. I'll probably be able to 
get around to you in ten years, anyway. (Mr. 
Hergesheimer bows and retires.) 

Clerk Phelps : John Galsworthy ! 

Mr. Follett (brightening) : Some of the Eng- 
lishmen ! This is better ! Besides, I know all about 
Galsworthy. 

Mr. Galsworthy (coming forward) : I feel 
much honored. 

Counsel for the Prosecution: If the court 
please, I must state that for some time now Mr. 
Galsworthy has been published serially in a maga- 
zine with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers. 
Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember 
which. 

Mr. Brownell : What, six ? Then he has more 
readers than can be counted on the fingers of one 
hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I 
think this is conclusive. 

Mr. Boynton : Oh, decidedly. 

Mr. Follett : But I put him in my book on mod- 
ern novelists, all of whom were hand picked. 

Mr. Galsworthy (with much calmness for one 
uttering a terrible heresy) : Perhaps that's the diffi- 



In the Critical Court 45 

culty, really. All hand picked. Do you know, I 
rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to 
withdraw. (And he does.) 

The Clerk : Herbert George Wells ! 

Mr. Wells (sauntering up and speaking with a 
certain inattention) : Respecting my long novel, 
Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to 
be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah 
by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even 
able to admire the Germans because, after all, they 
knew where they were going, they knew what they 
were after, their education had them headed for 
something. It had, indeed. I think Petah over- 
looks the fact that it had headed them for Paris 
in 1914. 

The point that Oswald and I make in the book is 
that England and the Empire, in 19 14 and prior 
thereto, had not been headed for anything, educa- 
tionally or otherwise, except Littleness in every 
field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every 
province of human affairs. And the proof of this, 
we argue, is found in the first three years of the 
Great War. No doubt. The first three years of 
the war prove so many things that this may well be 
among them ; don't you think so ? 

Without detracting from the damning case which 
Oswald and I make out against England it does 
occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new 
book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eat- 



46 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ing so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting. 
Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British 
leadership has been, indisputable as it is that Gen- 
eral Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hun- 
dreds of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is 
equally indisputable that the Australians who died 
like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the 
Tommies who were shot by their own guns at 
Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the 
undersized and undernourished and unintellectual 
Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders 
gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Eng- 
lishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart. 

And if it comes to a question as to the blame for 
the war as distinguished from the question as to 
the blame for the British conduct of the war, the 
latter being that with which Joan and Peter is al- 
most wholly concerned, I should like to point out 
now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my 
next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless. 
Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the ter- 
rible responsibility which I have showed some un- 
willingness to place entirely and clearly on Ger- 
many. 

For after all, it was Science that made the war 
and that waged it; it was the idolatry of Science that 
had transformed the German nation by transform- 
ing the German nature. It was the proofs of what 
Science could do that convinced Prussia of her 



In the Critical Court 47 

power, that made her confident that with this new 
weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a 
part in setting up that worship of Science. I have 
been not only one of its prophets but a high priest 
in its temple. 

And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when 
I find myself, as in Joan and Peter, still kneeling at 
the shrine. What is the cure for war? I ask. 
Petah tells us that our energies must have some 
other outlet. We must explore the poles and dig 
through the earth to China. He himself will go 
back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and 
if he is good enough he'll do something on the 
border line between biology and chemistry. Joan 
will build model houses. And the really curious 
thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run 
the unspeakable risks of trying to educate still an- 
other generation, a generation which, should it have 
to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars, 
might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacri- 
fices involved, just as they blame the old Victorians 
for the sacrifice of 191 4-1 91 8. 

Mr. Howells: In heaven's name, what is this 
tirade? 

Mr. Brownell : Mr. Wells is merely writing his 
next book, that's all. 

(As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court 
adjourns without a day.) 



BOOK "REVIEWING" 



IV 



BOOK "REVIEWING' 



ON the subject of Book "Reviewing" we feel 
we can speak freely, knowing all about the 
business, as we do, though by no means a practi- 
tioner, and having no convictions on the score of 
it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though 
many times indicted, a conviction has never been 
secured against us. However, it isn't considered 
good form (whatever that is) to talk about your 
own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the 
weather, you should say pleasantly to your neigh- 
bor : "What an interesting burglary you committed 
last night! We were all quite stirred up!" It is 
almost improper (much worse than merely im- 
moral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remark- 
ing : "If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday 
was a particularly good job !" 

For this reason, if for no other, we would re- 
frain, ordinarily, from talking about book "review- 
ing"; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has men- 
tioned the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and 
thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for 
all, there really seems no course open but to pick 

51 



52 Why Authors Go Wrong 

up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful 
way. 



Book reviewing is so called because the books are 
not reviewed, or viewed (some say not even read). 
They are described with more or less accuracy and 
at a variable length. They are praised, condemned, 
weighed and solved by the use of logarithms. 
They are read, digested, quoted and tested for but- 
ter fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and 
assessed ; criticised, and frequently found fault with 
(not the same thing, of course) ; chronicled and 
even orchestrated by the few who never write 
words without writing both words and music. 
James Huneker could make Irvin Cobb sound like 
a performance by the Boston Symphony. Others, 
like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift. 
Mr. De Casseres writes book revues. 



Any one can review a book and every one should 
be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor. 
Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a 
week, working only in their spare time, like the 
good-looking young men and women who sell the 
Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal 
and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn 



Book "Reviewing" 53 

over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the 
very few subjects not taught by the correspondence 
schools, simply because there is nothing to teach. 
It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect 
safety. Write for circular giving full particulars 
and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard 
phrases indispensable to any reviewer — FREE. 

In reviewing a book there is no method to be 
followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut 
the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or 
write) by instinct! Although no directions are 
necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome 
the beginner's utterly irrational sense of helpless- 
ness. 

One of the most useful comments in dealing with 
very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the 
Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical En- 
terprises by Jacob Jones, is as follows : "Mr. Jones's 
work shows signs of haste." The peculiar advan- 
tage of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones ; the 
haste may have been the printer's or the publisher's 
or almost anybody's but the postofrice's. In the 
case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start 
your review is by saying: "A new book from the 
pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome." But 
suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest 
opening sentences for the review of a first book 
runs: "For a first novel, George Lamplit's Good 
Gracious! is a tale of distinct promise." Be care- 



\ 



54 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ful to say "distinct"; it is an adjective that fits 
perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested 
noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger 
carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have. 



But clothes do not make the man and words do 
not make the book review. A book review must 
have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than 
the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a 
backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand 
erect and look the author in the face and tell him 
to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the 
Authors' League will build one of these days after 
it has met running expenses. 

Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary 
book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual 
books drain his vital energy to the extent of a 
paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square 
inch. 

He makes it a point to have one commendatory 
phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a 
nicely balanced, "on the one hand ... on the 
other hand" effect. He says that the book is at- 
tractively bound but badly printed ; well-written but 
deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but 
weak in characterization; has a good plot but is 
devoid of style. 



Book "Reviewing" 55 

He reads all the books he reviews. Every little 
while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438, 
or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not 
read the books they review may chance upon such 
details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while 
looking at the back cover, but they never bring in 
three runs on the other side's error. They spot the 
fact that the heroine's mother, who was killed in 
a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a re- 
frigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and they 
indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the hero- 
ine's mother's whereabouts after her demise. But 
the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter 
XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological 
impulse which led the hero to jump from Brooklyn 
Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely 
and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding 
to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The 
fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie be- 
cause he found something obscurely hateful in the 
Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking 
to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he 
gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings 
limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept 
asking : "Why don't they get a gold filling for that 
cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers ?" 
And he would ask himself despondently: "Is this 
what I live for?" And gradually he felt that it 
was not. He felt that it might be something to 



56 Why Authors Go Wrong 

die about, however. And so, with the rashness of 
youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas 
Hardy irony came into the story when he was 
pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda's 
affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the mag- 
nificent steam yacht Chuggermugger. 

So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put 
backbone into it. Read before you write. Look 
before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; 
and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and 
when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all 
things to all books. Remember the author. Re- 
view as you would be reviewed by. If a book is 
nothing in your life it may be the fault of your 
life. And it is always less expensive to revise your 
life than to revise the book. Your life is not 
printed from plates that cost a fortune to make 
and another fortune to throw away. "Life is too 
short to read inferior books, ,, eh? Books are too 
good to be guillotined by inferior lives — or inferior 
livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, 
but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics. 



But when we say so much we have only touched 
the surface of a profound matter. The truth of 
that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be 
plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It 



Book "Reviewing" 57 

can only be written about or around. It is insus- 
ceptible of such handling as is accorded a play, 
for example. 

A man with more or less experience in seeing 
plays and with more or less knowledge of the 
drama goes to the first performance of a new com- 
edy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him 
in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The 
play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is 
either good or bad. Every item of the per- 
formance is capable of being resolved separately 
and estimated; and the collective interest or im- 
portance of these items can be determined, is, in 
fact, determined once and for all by the perform- 
ance itself. The observer gets their collective im- 
pact at once and his task is really nothing but a 
consideration afterward in such detail as he cares 
to enter upon of just how that impact was secured. 
Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your 
arithmetically earnest childhood, "factor" a quan- 
tity or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, 
but after some mental and pencil investigation you 
found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7. 
Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was 
produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7. 
You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that 
you might review a play. 

Now it is impossible to review a book as you 
would factor a number or a play. You can't be 



58 Why Authors Go Wrong 



sure of the factors that make up the collective im- 
pact of the book upon you. There's no way of 
getting at them. They are summed up in the book 
itself and no book can be split into multipliable 
parts. A book is not the author times an idea times 
the views of the publisher. A book is unfavor- 
able, often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is 
a series of accretions about a central thought. The 
central thought is like the grain of sand which the 
oyster has pearled over. The central thought may 
even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a 
very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least, 
for all that. There is nothing to do with a book 
but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, 
scalpel and curette, chisel and auger — smashing it 
to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleav- 
ing through the layers of words and subsidiary 
ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of 
it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that 
was the earliest foundation. 

Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and 
wickedly destructive; it may uncover something 
worth while and it may not ; naturally, you don't go 
in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a gen- 
eral thing you take a book as it is and not as it 
once was or as the author may, in the innocence of 
his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have 
intended it to be. 



Book "Reviewing" 59 



6 

Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human 
being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justi- 
fication for it is the chance of saving life. If the 
operator can save the author's life (as an author) 
by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The 
fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of 
books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author 
are not necessarily of more account than the 
screams of the sick child's parent. There have 
been such literary operations for which, in lieu of 
the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has 
been rewarded and more than repaid by a private 
letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. 
No matter how hard up the recipient of such a let- 
ter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those 
auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph 
Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unex- 
pected and astonishingly large price. 

7 

There is a good deal to be said for taking a book 
as it is. Most books, in fact, should be taken that 
way. For the number of books which contain 
within them issues of life and death is always very 
small. You may handle new books for a year and 
come upon only one such. And when you do, un- 



60 Why Authors Go Wrong 

less you recognize its momentousness, no responsi- 
bility rests on you to do anything except follow a 
routine procedure. In this domain ignorance is a 
wholly valid excuse; no one would think of blam- 
ing a general practitioner of medicine for not remov- 
ing the patient's vermiform appendix on principle, 
so to say. Unless he apprehended conclusively 
that the man had appendicitis and unless he knew 
the technique of the operation he would certainly 
be blamed for performing it. Similarly, unless the 
handler of new books is dead sure that a fatality 
threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy 
or Mary Roberts Rinehart, unless the new 
book of Mr. Wright or Mr. Galsworthy or 
Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistak- 
able symptom, unless, further, he knows what to 
uncover in that book and how to uncover it, he ha9 
no business to take the matter in hand at all. 
Though the way of most "reviewers" with new 
books suggests that their fundamental motto must 
be that one good botch deserves another. 

Not at all. Better, if you don't know what to 
do, to leave bad enough alone. ^ 

But since the book as it is forms 99 percent, of 
the subject under consideration this aspect of deal- 
ing with new books should be considered first and 
most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the 
one percent, of books that require to go under the 
knife. 



Book "Reviewing" 61 



8 

Now the secret of taking a book as it is was 
never very abstruse and is always perfectly simple; 
nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most of the 
persons who deal with new books. It is a secret 
only because it is forever hidden from their eyes. 
Or maybe they deliberately look the other way. 

There exists in the world as at present consti- 
tuted a person called the reporter. He is, mostly, 
an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in small places, 
of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the 
cities of America that he is brought to his perfec- 
tion and in this connection it is worth while point- 
ing out what Irvin Cobb has already noted — the 
difference between the New York reporter and the 
reporter of almost any other city in America. The 
New York reporter "works with" his rival on an- 
other sheet; the reporter outside New York almost 
never does this. Cobb attributed the difference to 
the impossible tasks that confront reporters in New 
York, impossible, that is, for single-handed ac- 
complishment. A man who should attempt to 
cover alone some New York assignments, to "beat" 
his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a New 
York paper details half a dozen men to a job real 
competition between rival outfits is feasible and 
sometimes occurs. But the point here is this : The 
New York reporter, by generally "working with" 



62 Why Authors Go Wrong 

his fellow from another daily, has made of his 
work a profession, with professional ideals and 
standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and de- 
cidedly high rules of what is honorable and what 
is not. Elsewhere reporting remains a business, 
decently conducted to be sure, open in many in- 
stances to manifestations of chivalry; but essen- 
tially keen, sharp-edged, cut-throat competition. 

Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest 
estate that we would speak here — the reporter who 
is not only a keen and honest observer but a happy 
recorder of what he sees and hears and a profes- 
sional person with ethical ideals in no respect in- 
ferior to those of any recognized professional man 
on earth. 

There are many things which such a reporter will 
not do under any pressure of circumstance or at 
the beck of any promise of reward. He will not 
distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will 
not put in people's mouths words that they did not 
say and he will not let the reader take their words 
at face value if, in the reporter's own knowledge, 
the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No 
reporter can see and hear everything and no re- 
porter's story can record even everything that the 
observer contrived to see and hear. It must record 
such things as will arouse in the reader's mind a 
correct image and a just impression. 

How is this to be done? Why, there is no 



Book "Reviewing" 63 

formula. There's no set of rules. There's noth- 
ing but a purpose animating every word the man 
writes, a purpose served, and only half -consciously 
served, by a thousand turns of expression, a thou- 
sand choices of words. Like all honest endeavors 
to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled, 
made empty of result by deliberate art. Good re- 
porters are neither born nor made; they evolve 
themselves and without much help from any outside 
agency, either. They can be hindered but not pre- 
vented, helped but not hurt. You may remember a 
saying that God helps those who help themselves. 
The common interpretation of this is that when a 
man gets up and does something of his own initia- 
tive Providence is pretty likely to play into his 
hands a little ; not at all, that isn't what the proverb 
means. What it does mean is just this : That those 
who help themselves, who really do lift themselves 
by their bootstraps, are helped by God ; that it isn't 
they who do the lifting but somebody bigger than 
themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever that 
good reporters are good reporters because God 
makes them so. They aren't good reporters at 
three years of age; they get to be. Does this seem 
discouraging? It ought to be immensely encour- 
aging, heartening, actually "uplifting" in the finest 
sense of a tormented word. For if we believed 
that good reporters were born and not made there 
would be no hope for any except the gifted few, 



64 Why Authors Go Wrong 

endowed from the start; and if we believed that 
good reporters were made and not born there would 
be absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever 
— every one should be potentially a good reporter 
and it would be simply a matter of correct train- 
ing. But if we believe that a good reporter is 
neither born nor made, but makes himself with the 
aid of God we can be unqualifiedly cheerful. There 
is hope for almost any one under such a dispensa- 
tion; moreover, if we believe in God at all and in 
mankind at all we must believe that between God 
and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters will 
never entirely fail. The two together will come 
pretty nearly meeting the demand every day in the 
year. 



Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem 
to hear murmurs. What has all this about the 
genesis and nature of good reporters to do with 
the publication of new books? Why, this: The 
only person who can deal adequately and amply 
with 99 new books out of a hundred — the 99 that 
require to be taken as they are — is the good re- 
porter. He's the boy who can read the new book 
as he would look and listen at a political conven- 
tion, or hop around at a fire — getting the facts, get- 
ting them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them 
straight) and setting them down, swiftly and se- 



Book "Reviewing" 65 

lectively, to reproduce in the mind of the public 
the precise effect of the book itself. The effect — 
not the means by which it was achieved, not the 
desirability of it having been achieved, not the 
artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not 
anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or 
a deduction, however obvious — just the effect. 
That's reporting. That's getting and giving the 
news. And that's what the public wants. 

Some people seem to think there is something 
shameful in giving the public what it wants. They 
would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer 
who gave his customer something "just as good" 
or (according to the grocer) "decidedly better." 
But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral 
practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of 
intention can take it out of the class of deception 
and cheating. 

But, they cry, the public does not want what is 
sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that 
is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants. 
So they shift their ground and think to escape on 
a high moral plateau or table land. But the table 
land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that 
they are confidently setting their judgment of what 
the public ought to want against the public's plain 
decision what it does want. They are a few dozens 
against many millions, yet in their few dozen intel- 
ligences is collected more wisdom than has been 



66 Why Authors Go Wrong 

the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the 
other sons of earth. They really believe that. 
. . . Pitiable . . . 



10 

A new book is news. This might almost be set 
down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing 
formal demonstration by the Euclidean process. 
Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we 
shall demonstrate accordingly. 

In the strict sense, anything that happens is news. 
Everybody remembers the old distinction, that if 
a dog bites a man it is very likely not news, but 
that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil. 
Such a generalization is useful and fairly harm- 
less (like the generalization we ourselves have just 
indulged in and are about proving) if — a big if — 
the broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John 
D. Rockefeller, Jr., it is not only news but rather 
more important, or certainly more interesting, news 
than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a dog. 
For the chances are that John Jones of Howlers- 
ville is a poor demented creature, after all. Now 
the dog that bites Mr. Rockefeller is very likely 
a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction 
lies in this : the dog bitten by John Jones is almost 
certainly not as well-known or as interesting or as 
important in the lives of a number of people as 



Book "Reviewing" 67 

Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his 
teeth in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with 
the wretch who puts his teeth in an innocent canine 
bystander (it's the innocent bystander who always 
gets hurt) ; do this and you still have to match up 
the hound of Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller. 
And the scale of news values tips heavily away 
from Howlersville and in the direction of 26 
Broadway. 

So it is plain that not all that happens is news 
compared with some that happens. The law of 
specific interest, an intellectual counterpart of the 
law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules 
in the world of events. Any one handling news 
who disregards this law does so at his extreme 
peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than 
the water it displaces may reasonably expect to 
see his fine craft sink without a trace. 

Since a new book is a thing happening it is news, 
subject to the broad correction we have been dis- 
cussing above, namely, that in comparison with 
other new books it may not be news at all, its spe- 
cific interest may be so slight as to be negligible 
entirely. 

But if a particular new book is news, if its spe- 
cific interest is moderately great, then obviously, 
we think, the person best fitted to deal with it is 
a person trained to deal with news, namely, a re- 
porter. Naturally we all prefer a good reporter. 



68 Why Authors Go Wrong 



II 

The question will at once be raised : How is the 
specific interest of a new book to be determined? 
We answer : Just as the specific interest of any kind 
of potential news or actual news is determined — 
in competition with the other news of the day and 
hour. What is news one day isn't news another. 
This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader 
of every daily paper is more or less consciously 
aware. There are some days when "there's no 
news in the paper." There are other days when 
the news in the paper is so big and so important 
that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get 
themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting 
a white paper supply which does not at present ex- 
ist, it would, of course, be possible on the "big 
days" to record all these lesser doings; and con- 
sistently, day in and day out, to print nicely pro- 
portioned accounts of every event attaining to a 
certain fixed level of specific interest. But the 
reader who may think he would like this would 
speedily find out that he didn't. Some days he 
would have a twelve page newspaper and other 
days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of 
thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his 
attention would be lost in the jungle of events that 
all happened within twenty-four hours, with the 
profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting 



Book "Reviewing" 69 



up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His 
natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fel- 
lows were doing would be alternately starved and 
overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and 
incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hate- 
ful misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and hav- 
ing a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out 
the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) 
of the New York Evening Journal. It is really 
dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to 
the motto of the New York Times — "All the news 
that's fit to print" — would work in New York City. 

No mortal has more than a certain amount of 
time daily and a certain amount of attention (ac- 
cording to his mental habit and personal interest) 
to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, 
or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday 
he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a 
limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently 
the whole problem for the persons engaged in 
gathering and preparing news for presentation to 
readers sums up in this: "How many of the day's 
doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of 
public interest and importance, shall we set before 
our clients?" Easily answered, in most cases; and 
the size of the paper is the index of the answer. 
Question Two : "What of the day's doings shall be 
served up in the determined space?" 

For this question there is never an absolute or 



70 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ready answer, and there never can be. On some of 
the affairs to be reported all journalists would 
agree; but they would differ in their estimates of 
the relative worth of even these and the lengths at 
which they should be treated; about lesser occur- 
rences there would be no fixed percentage of agree- 
ment. 

12 

Now the application of all this to the business of 
giving the news of .books should be fairly clear. 
A new book is news — and so, sometimes, is an old 
one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it 
should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all 
that happens is news; not all the new books pub- 
lished are news; new books, like new events of all 
sorts, are news when they compete successfully 
with a majority of their kind. 

There is no more sen,se in reporting — that is, de- 
scribing individually at greater or less length — all 
the new books than there would be in reporting 
every incident on the police blotters of a lively 
American city. Recording new books is another 
matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in 
this world get recorded in written words that reach 
nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as 
in letters) or are accessible to the interested few 
(as the police records). The difference between the 
reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference 



Book "Reviewing" yi 

of details given. The recorder usually follows a pre- 
scribed formula and makes his record conform 
thereto ; the good reporter never has a formula and 
never can have one. Let us see how this works out 
with the news of books. 

The recorder of new books generally compiles a 
list of Books Received or Books Just Published and 
he does it in this uninspired and conscientious man- 
ner: 

IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William 
Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last 
half -century, centered in a single town, show- 
ing its evolution from prairie to an industrial 
city with difficult economic and labor prob- 
lems; the story told in the lives of a group of 
people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers — 
their work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c. 
New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60. 

That would be under the heading Fiction. An en- 
try under the heading Literary Studies or Essays 
might read : 

OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard 
Cook. Volume II. in a series of books on 
modern American writers. Sketches of sixty- 
eight American poets, nearly all living, in- 



72 Why Authors Go Wrong 

eluding Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, 
Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, 
Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, 
Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, 
Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. 
New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60. 

These we hasten to say would be unusually full 
and satisfactory records, but they would be records 
just the same — formal and precise statements of 
events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates 
in an almanac. If all records were like these 
there would be less objection to them; but it is an 
astonishing truth that most records are badly kept. 
Why, one may never fathom; since the very for- 
mality and precision make a good record easy. 
Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines 
in the United States devoted to the news of new 
books is likely to make a record on this order: 

IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William 
Allen White. Novel of contemporary Amer- 
ican life. New York, &c. 

Such a record is, of course, worse than inade- 
quate ; it is actually misleading. Mr. White's book 
happens to cover a period of fifty years. "Con- 
temporary American life" would characterize quite 
as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York 
and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers. 



Book "Reviewing" 73 



14 

The reporter works in entirely another manner. 
He is concerned to present the facts about a new 
book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertain- 
ing to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says 
with fine perception, the true function of the de- 
scriber of new books is simply to bring a particu- 
lar volume to the attention of its proper public. 
To do that it is absolutely necessary to "give the 
book," at least to the extent of enabling the reader 
of the article to determine, with reasonable accu- 
racy ( 1 ) whether the book is for him, that is, ad- 
dressed to a public of which he is one, and (2) 
whether he wants to read it or not. 

Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. 
A man interested in sociology may conceivably 
want to read a book on sociology even though it is 
an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even 
though he knows its worthlessness. He may want 
to profit by the author's mistakes; he may want to 
write a book to correct them; or he may merely 
want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow soci- 
ologist making a fool of himself, a spectacle by 
no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity 
for giving joy to the mildly malicious. 

The determination of the goodness or badness 
of a book is not and should not be a deliberate 
purpose of the good book reporter. Why? Well, 



74 Why Authors Go Wrong 

in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take 
a reporter who goes to cover a public meeting at 
which speeches are made. He does not find it 
necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So's speech was 
good. He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a 
fair sample of it; which is enough. The reader 
can see for himself how good or bad it was and 
reach a conclusion based on the facts as tempered 
by his personal beliefs, tastes and ideas. 

In the same way, it is superfluous for the book 
reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such's book on 
New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down 
the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates 
the Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue 
and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium 
as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this 
should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible 
nature of the volume the reporter may very properly 
give the truth about the Woolworth building ancbthe 
Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never 
visited New York and might be unable to detect 
Miss Such-and-Such's idiosyncrasies. 

The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why 
should the book reporter ask his reader to accept 
his dictum that the literary style of a writer is 
atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sen- 
tences or a paragraph from the book? 



Book "Reviewing" 75 

15 

Yet books are still in the main "reviewed/' in- 
stead of being given into the hands of trained news 
reporters. Anything worse than the average book 
"review" it would certainly be difficult to find in 
the length and breadth of America. And England, 
despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is 
nearly as badly off. 

No one who is not qualified as a critic should 
attempt to criticise new books. 

There are but few critics in any generation — 
half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single 
one of the larger countries are all who could qual- 
ify at a given time; that much seems evident. 
What is a critic ? A critic is a person with an edu- 
cation unusually wide either in life or in letters, 
and preferably in both. He is a person with huge 
backgrounds. He has read thousands of books 
and has by one means or another abstracted the 
essence of thousands more. He has perhaps 
travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; 
but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and 
exceptional intensity, descending to greater emo- 
tional and intellectual depths than the majority of 
mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in 
some degree, the faculty of living other people's 
lives and sharing their human experiences which is 
the faculty that, in a transcendant degree, belongs 



76 Why Authors Go Wrong 



to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the 
past and the present so well that he is able to erect 
standards, or uncover old standards, by which he 
can and does measure the worth of everything that 
comes before him. He can actually show you, in 
exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan com- 
pares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton 
ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned 
more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he 
can trace the relation between a period in the life 
of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in 
The Arrow of Gold. 

Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make 
mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of 
personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a 
knowledge they haven't. They are mistakes of 
judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists 
sometimes make after years on the bench. The 
jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic 
is reversed by the appellate decree of the future. 

The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of 
a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and 
sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned 
and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the 
correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 per- 
sons who assume the critical ermine without any 
fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and 
they are just the mistakes that would be made 
by a layman sitting in the jurist's seat. The 



Book "Reviewing" yy 

jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence, 
the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into 
the record. So the critic; with the difference that 
the true critic merely presides and leaves the ver- 
dict to that great jury of true and right instincts 
which we call "the public.' ' The genuine critic is 
concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the 
jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury 
what its verdict must be — except in extraordinary 
circumstances — he does instruct it what the verdict 
should be on, what should be considered in arriv- 
ing at it, what principles should guide the decision. 

But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it 
in his mind that he must play judge and jury too. 
He doesn't like the writer's style, or thinks the plot 
is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of 
carefully outlining the evidence on which the pub- 
lic might reach a correct verdict on these points he 
delivers a dictum. It doesn't go, of course, at 
least for long; and it never will. 

Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as spe- 
cific, that is, as a general discussion can be and 
remain widely applicable. 

I don't like the writer's style. I am not a per- 
son of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we 
will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with 
a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely 
present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and 
nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so ma- 



78 Why Authors Go Wrong 



terial, as the lawyers would say. I may, in the 
necessity to be brief and the absence of space for 
an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or ad- 
verbial, or diffuse, or involved or florid or some- 
thing of that sort, if I know it to be. These would 
be statements of fact. "Bad" is a statement of 
opinion. 

I may call the plot "weak" if it is weak (a fact) 
and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies 
me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot 
"poor" I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its 
poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are 
spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader's 
interest almost to the exclusion of other things — 
fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on. 

And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse 
the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near- 
critic who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or 
involved, however much these may be facts, and 
who does not at least briefly explain in what way 
the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the 
weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger 
on the how or the where or the why requires a 
knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does 
not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire ; 
so we are asking him to do the impossible. Never- 
theless we can ask him to do the possible; and that 
is to leave off talking or writing on matters he 
knows nothing about. 



Book "Reviewing" 79 

16 

The task of training good book reporters is not 
a thing to be easily and lightly undertaken. And 
the first essential in the making of such a reporter 
is the inculcation of a considerable humility of 
mind. A near-critic can afford to think he knows 
it all, but a book reporter cannot. Besides a sense 
of his own limitations the book reporter must pos- 
sess and develop afresh from time to time a mental 
attitude which may best be summed up in this dis- 
tinction: When a piece of writing seems to him 
defective he must stop short and ask himself, "Is 
this defect a fact or is it my personal feeling ?" If 
it is a fact he must establish it to his own, and 
then to the reader's, satisfaction. If it is his per- 
sonal impression or feeling, merely, as he may con- 
clude on maturer reflection, he owes it to those 
who will read his article either not to record it or 
to record it as a personal thing. There is no sense 
in saying only the good things that can be said 
about a book that has bad things in it. Such a 
course is dishonest. It is equally dishonest, and 
infinitely more common, to pass off private opin- 
ions as statements of fact. 

When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in 
favor of the author. A good working test of 
fact versus personal opinion is this : If you, as a 
reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent 



8o Why Authors Go Wrong 



flaw, cannot give the how or where or why of the 
thing that seems wrong, it must be treated as your 
personal feeling. A fact that you cannot buttress 
might as well not be a fact at all — unless, of course, 
it is self-evident, in which case you have only to 
state it or exhibit your evidence to command a uni- 
versal assent. 

All that we have been saying respecting the fact 
or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with 
equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as 
the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter, 
may reach. Because a story strikes you as won- 
derful it does not follow that it is wonderful. You 
are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish 
the wonder of it. The procedure for the book re- 
porter who has to describe favorably and for the 
book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the 
same. First comes the question of fact, then the 
citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be 
impossible the brief indication of the how, the 
where, the why of the merit reported. If the meri- 
toriousness remains a matter of personal impres- 
sion it ought so to be characterized but may warrant- 
ably be recorded where an adverse impression 
would go unmentioned. The presumption is in 
favor of the author. It should be kept so. 



Book "Reviewing" 81 



17 

In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing 
millennial. But what has been outlined of the 
work of the true book reporter is as far as possible 
from what we very generally get to-day. We get 
unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation; 
we do not expect analysis but we have a right to 
expect straightaway exposition and a condensed 
transliteration of the book being dealt with. 

"Praise," we have just said, and "condemna- 
tion." That is what it is, and there is no room in 
the book reporter's task either for praise or con- 
demnation. He is not there to praise the book 
any more than a man is at a political convention 
to praise a nominating speech; he is there to de- 
scribe the book, to describe the speech, to report 
either. A newspaperman who should begin his ac- 
count of a meeting in this fashion, "In a lamentably 
poor speech, showing evidences of hasty prepara- 
tion, Elihu Root," &c, would be fired — and ought 
to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard 
Mr. Root thought the same way about it. 

18 

The book reporter will be governed in his work 
by the precise news value in the book he is dealing 



82 Why Authors Go Wrong 



with at the moment he is dealing with it. This 
needs illustration. 

On November n, 1918, an armistice was con- 
cluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted 
over four years. In that four years books relat- 
ing to the war then being waged had sold heavily, 
even at times outselling fiction. Had the war 
drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books 
would probably have lessened, little by little, until 
they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. 
From this they would doubtless have declined, as 
the end drew near, lower and lower, until the fore- 
seen end came, when the interest in them would 
have been as great, but not much greater, than the 
normal interest in works of a historical or biograph- 
ical sort. 

But the end came overnight; and suddenly the 
whole face of the world was transformed. The re- 
action in the normal person was intense. In an 
instant war books of several pronounced types be- 
came intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the 
War by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously 
unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentar- 
ily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences 
of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting 
nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland. 

The book reporter who had any sense of news 
values grasped this immediately. Books that a 
month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to 



Book "Reviewing" 83 

1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no 
space at all. On the other hand books which had 
a historical value and a place as interesting public 
records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 
were not diminished either in interest or in impor- 
tance. 

Some books which had been inconsequential were 
correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn 
of affairs. These were books on such subjects as 
the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles 
which might underlie the formation of a league of 
nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. 
They had been worth, some of them, very small 
articles a week earlier; now they were worth a 
column or two apiece. 

No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedi- 
ous essay with some observations on the one per 
cent, of books which call for swift surgery. But 
such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraor- 
dinarily difficult for the reason that the same opera- 
tion is never called for twice. 

In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting 
a large stone into smaller stones. The problem 
varies each time. The cutter respects certain prin- 
ciples and follows a careful technique. That is all. 

We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an 



84 Why Authors Go Wrong 

actual instance. In 191 8 there was published a 
novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American 
novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to 
entitle her to the designation "a genius." 

Miss Johnston's first novel had appeared twenty 
years earlier. Her first four books — nay, her first 
two, the second being To Have and to Hold — 
placed her firmly in the front rank of living roman- 
tic writers. The thing that distinguished her 
romanticism was its sense of drama in human af- 
fairs and human destiny. Added to this was a 
command of live, nervous, highly poetic |>rose. 
History — romance; it did not matter. She could 
set either movingly before you. 

Her work showed steady progress, reaching a 
sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, 
The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experi- 
mented a little, as in her poetic drama of the 
French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in 
The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediaeval 
France. The Wanderers was a more decided ven- 
ture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes. 

Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a 
story of friendship transformed into hatred and the 
pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreak- 
ing Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Con- 
sidered as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure. 

Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? 
Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel 



Book "Reviewing" 85 

anything more than "a good story, well told"? 
Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it. 

The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond 
the "good story, well told" has a just grievance 
against any one who asks anything further. But 
against the novelist who has endeavored to make 
his story, however good, however well told, the 
vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical 
speculation, the reader has a just grievance — if the 
endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy 
is unsound. 

Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a 
particular philosophy every reader must pronounce 
for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the 
basis of Miss Johnston's novel was this: All gods 
are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it 
matters not. "There swam upon him another great 
perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in 
light. The glorified — the unified. Union." Up- 
on this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes. 

This perfectly comprehensible mystical concep- 
tion is the rock on which the whole story is founded 
— and the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will 
be seen at once that the conception is one which 
no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian 
— nor any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either. 
To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the 
philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was 



86 Why Authors Go Wrong 

worthless except for the superficial incidents and 
the lovely prose in which they were recounted. 

It might be thought that for those who accepted 
the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes 
would have been a novel of the first rank. No, 
indeed; and for this reason: 

Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be ar- 
rived at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of 
about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed 
to transform the whole nature of that man so as to 
lead him to give over a life-long enmity in N which 
he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument 
to punish an evil-doer. 

Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring 
and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed 
to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware 
that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility. 
Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above 
all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians; 
some of them were irreligious, some of them were 
God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-in- 
clusive sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The 
idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be 
nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is 
an idea which could never have occurred to the 
eighteenth century Scotch mind — and never did. 
Least of all could it have occurred to such a man 
as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine. 

The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It 



Book "Reviewing" 87 

is a historical anachronism, if you like, the history 
here being the history of the human spirit in its 
religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no 
matter how willing he may have been to accept the 
novelist's underlying idea, was aware that the en- 
deavor to convey it had utterly failed, was aware 
that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea, 
her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one 
of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and 
a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may 
think in the twentieth century while tramping the 
Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have 
dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eigh- 
teenth century, not even though he lay in the flower- 
ing grass of the Roman Campagna. 

. . . And so there, in Foes, we have the book 
in a hundred which called for something more than 
the intelligent and accurate work of the book re- 
porter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and 
a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was 
not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader 
a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. 
It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as 
swiftly and as economically as possible — and as 
dispassionately — to the root of the trouble. For 
if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of per- 
formance her reputation would suffer, not to speak 
of her royalties; readers would be enraged or mis- 
led; young writers playing the sedulous ape would 



88 Why Authors Go Wrong 

inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers 
would be spoiled; publishers would lose money; — 
and, much the worst of all, the world would be de- 
prived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could 
do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work 
she did do. 

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the 
blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no 
necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was 
the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for 
reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the 
way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. 
Of course, it would not have been intellectually so 
exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional 
appeal, and it is not always base; there are emo- 
tions in the human so high and so lofty that it is 
wiser not to try to transcend them. . . . 

The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books 
and the Book World of The Sun, New York, 
brought a letter from Kansas which should find a 
place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted 
answer, may as well be given here. The writer is 
head of the English department in a State col- 
lege. He wrote: 

20 

"I hope that the mails lost for your college pro- 
fessors of English subscribers their copies of Books 



Book "Reviewing" 89 

and the Book World [containing the foregoing ob- 
servations on Book Reporting]. . . . College pro- 
fessors do not like to be disturbed — and most of 
us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those 
pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should 
have been. 

"When I read Book Reporting I dictated three 
pages of protest, but did not send it on — thanks to 
my better judgment. . . . Then I decided, since 
you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask 
you to help me. 

"We need it out here — literary help only, of 
course. This is the only State college on what was 
once known as the 'Great Plains.' W. F. Cody 
won his sobriquet on Government land which is now 
our campus. Our students are the sons and daugh- 
ters of pioneers who won over grasshoppers, 
droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They 
are so near to real life that the teaching of litera- 
ture must be as real as the literature — rather, it 
ought to be. That's where I want you to help me. 

"I am not teaching literature here now as I was 
taught geology back in Missouri. That's as near 
as I shall tell you how I teach — it is bad enough 
and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, 
in fairness to you, I should say that for several 
years never less than one-third of those to whom 
we gave degrees have majored in English, and al- 



90 Why Authors Go Wrong 



ways as many as the next two departments com- 
bined. ) 

"Here's what I am tired of and want to get 
away from: 

"i. Testing students on reading a book by ask- 
ing fact questions about what is in the book — 
memory work, you see. 

"2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the 
study of literature that is so acadetriic that it is 
Prussian. 

"3. Demanding that students serve time in lit- 
erature classes as a means of measuring their ad- 
vance in the study of literature. 

"Here's what I want you to help me with in some 
definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college pro- 
fessor making an assignment — beg pardon.) 

"1. Could you suggest a scheme of 'book re- 
porting' for college students in literature classes? 
(An old book to a new person is news, isn't it?) 

"2. Give me a list of books published during 
the last ten years that should be included in college 
English laboratory classes in literature. I want 
your list. I have my own, but fear it is too aca- 
demic. 

"3. What are some of the things which should 
enter into the training of teachers of high school 
English? Part of our work, especially in the sum- 
mer, is to give such training to men and women 



Book "Reviewing" 91 

who will teach composition and literature in Kan- 
sas high schools. 

"Your help will not only be appreciated, but it 
will be used." 

21 

To answer adequately these requests would take 
about six months' work and the answers would 
make a slender book. And then they would exhibit 
the defects inseparable from a one man response. 
None of which excuses a failure to attempt to an- 
swer, though it must extenuate failures in the at- 
tempt. 

We shall try to answer, in this place, though 
necessarily without completeness. If nothing bet- 
ter than a few suggestions is the result, why — sug- 
gestions may be all that is really needed. 

And first respecting the things our friend is tired 
of and wants to get away from : 

1. Fact questions about what is in the book — 
memory work — are not much use if they stop with 
the outline of the story. What is not in the book 
may be more important than what is. Why did the 
author select this scene for narration and omit that 
other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically 
interesting of the two? See The Flirt, by Booth 
Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a 
few lines and a small boy's doings occupy whole 
chapters. 



92 Why Authors Go Wrong 



2. Scholarship is less important than wide read- 
ing, though the two aren't mutually exclusive. A 
wide acquaintance doesn't preclude a few profound- 
ly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled 
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. 
Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be 
spoiled in the same way. 

3. Time serving over literature is a waste of 
time. There are only three ways td teach litera- 
ture. The first is by directing students to books for 
voluntary reading — hundreds of books, thousands. 
The second is by class lectures — entertaining, idea'd, 
anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in char- 
acter. The third is by conversation — argumenta- 
tive at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by 
way of exchanging information and opinions. 

Study books as you study people. Mix among 
them. You don't take notes on people unless, per- 
chance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you 
read, if you like, but don't "take notes." Look for 
those qualities in books that you look for in people 
and make your acquaintances by the same (per- 
haps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is 
as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows. 



22 

We go on to the first of our friend's requests 
for help. It is a scheme for "book reporting" for 



Book "Reviewing" 93 

college students in literature classes and he premises 
that an old book to a new reader is news. Of 
course it is. 

Let the student take up a book that's new to him 
and read it by himself, afterward writing a re- 
port of it to be read to the class. When he comes 
to write his report he must keep in the forefront of 
his mind this one thing: 

To tell the others accurately enough about that 
book so that each one of them will know whether 
or not he wants to read it. 

That is all the book reporter ever tries for. 
No book is intended for everybody, but almost 
every book is intended for somebody. The prob- 
lem of the book reporter is to find the reader. 

Comparison may help. For instance, those who 
enjoy Milton's pastoral poetry will probably enjoy 
the long poem in Robert Nichols's Ardours and 
Endurances. Those who like Thackeray will like 
Mary S. Watts. Those who like Anna Katharine 
Green will thank you for sending them to The 
Moonstone, by one Wilkie Collins. 

Most stories depend upon suspense in the action 
for their main effect. You must not "give away" 
the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In a mys- 
tery story you may state the mystery and appraise 
the solution or even characterize it — but you mustn't 
reveal it. 

Tell 'em that Mr. Hergesheimer's Java Head is 



94 Why Authors Go Wrong 

an atmospheric marvel, but will disappoint many 
readers who put action first. Tell 'em that Will- 
iam Allen White writes (often) banally, but so 
saturates his novel with his own bigheartedness 
that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell 'em the 
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth 
as well as you can make it out — and for heaven's 
sake ask yourself with every assertion: "Is this 
a fact or is it my personal opinion?" And a fact, 
for your purpose, will be an opinion in which a 
large majority of readers will concur. 

23 

"Give me a list of books published during the 
last ten years that should be included in college 
English laboratory classes in literature. I want 
your list. I have my own, but fear it is too aca- 
demic." 

The following list is an offhand attempt to com- 
ply with this request. It is offered merely for the 
suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restric- 
tion is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may 
be a little older than that. Strike them out. 

For Kansans: Willa Sibert Gather's novels, 
O Pioneers! and My Antonia, chronicling people 
and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen 
White's A Certain Rich Man and In the Heart of 



Book "Reviewing" 95 

a Fool, less for their Kansas-ness than for their 
Americanism and humanity. 

For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson's 
The Valley of Democracy. Zona Gale's Birth. Carl 
Sandburg's Chicago Poems. Edgar Lee Masters's 
Spoon River Anthology. Vachel Lindsay's longer 
poems. Mary S. Watts's Nathan Burke and Van 
Cleve: His Friends and His Family. Lord Charn- 
wood's life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells's 
The Leatherwood God. Booth Tarkington's The 
Conquest of Canaan (first published about fourteen 
years ago) and The Magnificent Amber sons. Gene 
Stratton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land, her 
Freckles and her A Girl of the Limberlost. One or 
two books by Harold Bell Wright. The Passing 
of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough, and other 
books in the Chronicles of America series published 
by the Yale University Press. 

For Americans: Mary S. Watts's The Rise of 
Jennie Cushing. Owen Wister's The Virginian (if 
not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tar- 
kington's The Flirt. Novels with American settings 
by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White. 
Mary Johnston's The Long Roll and Cease Firing. 
Willa Sibert Cather's The Song of the Lark. Edith 
Wharton's Ethan Frome. Alice Brown's The Pris- 
oner. Ellen Glasgow's The Deliverance. Corra 
Harris's A Circuit-Rider's Wife. All of O. Henry. 
Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman. Earlier 



96 Why Authors Go Wrong 

novels by Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole's The 
Harbor. Joseph Hergesheimer's The Three Black 
Pennys, his Gold and Iron and his Java Head. His- 
torical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American 
biographies too numerous to mention. From Isola- 
tion to Leadership : A Review of American Foreign 
Policy by Latane (published by the educational de- 
partment of Doubleday, Page & Company). Es- 
says, such as those of Agnes Repplier. 

Each of these enumerations presupposes the 
books already named, or most of them. Don't treat 
them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of 
them aren't. Those that have fine literary work- 
manship have something else, too — and it's the 
other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a 
book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, 
not a Magna Charta. "Manners makyth man"^- 
yah! 

24 

We are also asked: 

"What are some of the things which should en- 
ter into the training of teachers of high school En- 
glish?" 

We reply : 

A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but 
as it moulds lives. A profound respect for an au- 
thor who can find 100,000 readers, a respect at least 
equal to that entertained for an author who can 



Book "Reviewing" 97 

write superlatively well. For instance : Get it out 
of your head that you can afford to condescend 
toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer 
as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship. 

An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary 
man or woman as keen as your perception of what 
will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don't 
insist that people must live on what you, or any 
one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for 
nothing that they "don't know anything about lit- 
erature, but know what they like!' 

A confidence in the greater wisdom of the great- 
est number. Tarkington got it right. The public 
wants the best it is capable of understanding; its 
understanding may not be the highest understand- 
ing, but "the writer who stoops to conquer doesn't 
conquer." Neither does the writer who never con- 
cedes anything. The public's standard can't al- 
ways be wrong; the private standards can't always 
be right. 

Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the 
classics are made and kept alive by "the passionate 
few." But the business of high school teachers of 
English is not with the passionate few — who will 
look after themselves — but with the unimpassioned 
many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope's 
Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. 
Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense, 
it's all off. If you can't tell what it is a girl like9 



gS Why Authors Go Wrong 

in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show 
her what she'll like in Dickens? Unless you know 
what it is that "they" get out of these books they 
do read you won't be able to* bait the hook with the 
things you want them to read. Don't you think 
you've got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn't 
you do worse than sit down yourself and read at- 
tentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the 
best sellers? 

It all goes back to the size of the teacher's share 
of our common humanity. A person who can't 
read a detective story for the sake of the thrills 
has no business teaching high school English. A 
person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high 
school English. A person who can't sense (better 
yet, share) the common feeling about a popular 
writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympa- 
thize a little with it and express it more or less ar- 
ticulately in everyday speech is not qualified to teach 
high school English. 



25 

A word about writing "compositions" in high 
school English classes. Make 'em write stories in- 
stead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches 
or abstracter writing — little essays — why, let 'em. 
Abstractions in thought and writing are like the 
ocean — it's fatally easy to get beyond your depth, 



Book "Reviewing" 99 

and every one else's. Read what Sir Arthur 
Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Lit- 
erature. Once in a while a theologian urges us to 
"get back to the Bible." Well, there is one sense, 
at least, in which the world would do well to get 
back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any 
rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as 
English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune 
of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. 
Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. 
There was no such word as "virtue"; you said 
"sweet smellingness" or "pleasant tastingness" or 
something like that. And everybody knew what 
you meant. Whereas "virtue" means anything 
from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness 
that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced ab- 
stract thinking and expression and some Germans 
blighted the world by their abuse. 

What should enter into the training of high 
school teachers of English? Only humbleness, 
sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual 
willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the peo- 
ple — and undying enthusiasm. Only these — and 
the love of books. 



LITERARY EDITORS 

BY ONE OF THEM 



LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM 

THE very term "literary editor" is a survival. 
It is meaningless, but we continue to use it 
because no better designation has been found, just 
as people in monarchical countries continue to speak 
of "King George" or "Queen Victoria of Spain." 
Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one 
wants to be the first to allude publicly and truth- 
fully to "Figurehead George" or "Social Leader 
Victoria." 

Literary editors who are literary are not editors, 
and literary editors who are editors are no longer 
literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic 
men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in 
cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at 
night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words 
about what they had read. These were printed. 
Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had 
been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read 
them looked up to ask each other pathetically : "But 
what does it mean?" Book readers who read them 
resolved that the publication of a new book should 

103 



104 Why Authors Go Wrong 



be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was 
good for the secondhand trade. 

We've changed all that, or, if we haven't, we're 
going to. Take a chap who runs what is called 
a "book section." This is a separate section or 
supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday 
newspaper. Its pages are magazine size — half the 
size of newspaper pages. They number from eight 
to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the 
advertising. The essential thing to realize about 
such a section is that it requires an editor to run 
it. 

It does not require a literary man, or woman, at 
all. The editor of such a section need have no 
special education in the arts or letters. He must 
have judgment, of course, and if he has not some 
taste for literary matters he may not enjoy hi9 
work as he will if he has that taste. But high- 
browism is fatal. 

Can our editor "review" a book? Perhaps not. 
It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review 
when he sees it, which will matter a good deal. 
Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the 
books for him. Which will matter more than any- 
thing else on earth in the handling of his book 
section. 

A section will most certainly require, to run it, 
a man who can tell a good review (another word- 
survival) and who can get good reviewers. It 



Literary Editors 105 

will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear 
and very broad viewpoint. Such exist. What do 
we mean — viewpoint? 

The right conception, it seems to us, starts with 
the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes 
an old one is news too) and should be dealt with 
as such. Perhaps we are dealing only with a state 
of mind, in all this, but states of mind are impor- 
tant. They are the only states where self-deter- 
mination is a sure thing. To get on : 

Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an 
individual whose desk is usually not so far away 
but that you can study him in his habitat. The city 
editor tries to distinguish the big news from the 
little news. The literary editor will wisely do the 
same. What is big news in the world of books? 
Well, a book that appears destined to be read as 
widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publica- 
tion is big news. And a book that will be read 
immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news. 
People who talk about news often overlook the 
ephemeral side of it Much of the newsiness and 
importance of news resides in its transiency. What 
is news to-day isn't news to-morrow. But to-day 
100,000 people, more or less, will want to know 
about it. 

Illustration : Two events happen on the same day. 
One of them will be noted carefully in histories 
written fifty years hence, but it affects, and inter- 



106 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. 
Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that 
hour, be much bigger. For another event occur- 
ring on that same day, though of a character which 
will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and 
directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand. 

Parallel: Two books are published on the same 
day. One of them will be dissected fifty years 
later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts 
of that time. But the number of persons who will 
read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small 
— in the hundreds. The other book will be out of 
print and unremembered in five years. But within 
six months of its publication hundreds of thou- 
sands will read it. Among those hundreds of 
thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thou- 
sands, whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seri- 
ously modified and in some cases lastingly modified 
— whose very lives may change trend as a result of 
reading that book. 

No need to ask which event and which book is 
the bigger news. News is not the judgment of 
posterity on a book or event. News is not even 
the sum total of the effects of an event or a book 
on human society. News is the immediate impor- 
tance, or interest, of an event or a book to the 
greatest number of people. 

Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in 
every thousand persons in the United States, or 



Literary Editors 107 



perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once. 
Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O'Brien would 
say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one per- 
son in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the sub- 
ject matter were made comprehensible to him. The 
oldtime "reviewer" would write three solid columns 
about Isidor MacDougal's work. The present-day 
literary editor puts it in competent hands for a 
simplified description to be printed later; and mean- 
while he slaps Mrs. Porter's novel on his front 
page. 

The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles 
of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The 
worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error 
in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are 
good book reporters, but like the people on the 
city editor's staff they have usually their limitations, 
whether temperamental or knowledgable. Every 
once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire 
a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully 
but who has no sympathy with fires, who can't get 
through the fire lines, who writes that the fire 
"broke out" and burns up more words misdescrib- 
ing the facts than the copyreader can extinguish 
with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will hap- 
pen in the best regulated literary editor's sanctum 
that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong 
book to the right man. Then he learns how un- 



108 Why Authors Go Wrong 

reasonable an author can be, if he doesn't know 
already from the confidences of publishers. 

The literary editor's point of view, we believe, 
must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes 
Holliday in the essay on That Reviewer "Cuss" in 
the book Walking-Stick Papers. Few books that 
get published by established publishing houses are 
so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a 
body of readers somewhere, however small or scat- 
tered. The function of the book reporter is tran- 
scendently to find a book's waiting audience. If 
he can incidentally warn off those who don't belong 
to that audience, so much the better. That's a 
harder thing to do, of course. 



The first requisite in a good book, section is that 
it shall be interesting. As regards the news of new 
books, this is not difficult where book reporters, 
with the reporter's attitude, are on the job. Re- 
porter's stories are sometimes badly written, but 
they are seldom dull. New books described by per- 
sons who have it firmly lodged in their noodles that 
they are "reviewing" the books, fare badly. The 
reviewer-obsession manifests itself in different 
ways. Sometimes the new book is made to march 
past the reviewer in column of squads, deploying 
at page 247 into skirmish formation and coming 



Literary Editors 109 



at page 431 into company front. Very fine, but 
the reader wants to see them in the trenches, or, 
headed by the author uttering inspiriting yells, go- 
ing over the top. On other occasions the reviewer 
assumes the so-called judicial attitude, the true 
inwardness of which William Schwenk Gilbert was 
perhaps the first to appreciate, with the possible ex- 
ception of Lewis Carroll. Then doth our reviewer 
tell us what will be famous a century hence. Much 
we care what will be famous a century hence. 
What bothers us is what we shall read to-morrow. 
Of course it may happen to be one and the same 
book. Very well then, why not say so? 

The main interest of the book section is served 
by getting crackajack book reporters. They will 
suffice for the people who read the section because 
they are interested in books. If the literary editor 
stops there, however, he might as well never have 
started. These people would read the book section 
anyway, unless it were filled throughout with ab- 
solutely unreadable matter, as has been known to 
happen. Even then they would doubtless scan the 
advertisements. At least, that is the theory on 
which publishers hopefully proceed. There are 
book sections where the contributors always specify 
that their articles shall have a position next to ad- 
vertising matter. 

No, the literary editor must interest people who 
do not especially care about books as such. He 



no Why Authors Go Wrong 

can do it only by convincing them that books are 
just as full of life and just as much a part of a 
normal scheme of life as movies, or magazine cut- 
outs, or buying things on the instalment plan. 
Many a plain person has been led to read books by 
the fact that books are sometimes sold for instal- 
ment payments. Anything so sold, the ordinary 
person at once realizes, must be something which 
will fit into his scheme of existence. Acting on an 
instinct so old that its origin is shrouded in the 
mists of antiquity, the ordinary person pays the in- 
stalments. As a result, books are delivered at his 
residence. At first he is frightened. But he who 
looks and runs away may live to read another day. 
And from living to read it is but a step to reading 
to live. 

Now one way to interest people who don't care 
about books for books' sake is to get up attractive 
pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pic- 
tures, with jokes in the corners of 'em, with some 
new and original and not-hitherto-published matter 
in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type, 
with signed articles so that the reader can know 
who wrote it and like or hate him with the neces- 
sary personal tag. But these things aren't literary, 
at all. They are just plain human and fall in the 
field of action of every editor alive — though of 
course editors who are dead are exempt from deal- 
ing with them. That is why a literary editor has 



Literary Editors in 

no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not 
be if it is going to prevent his being human. 

We have been talking about the literary editor 
of a book section. There are not many book sec- 
tions in this country. There are hundreds of book 
pages — half -pages and whole pages and double 
pages. The word "technique" is a loathsome thing 
and really without any significance in this connec- 
tion, inasmuch as there is no particular way of do- 
ing the news of books well, and certainly no one 
way of doing it that is invariably better than any 
other. But for convenience we may permit our- 
selves to use the word "technique" for a moment; 
and, permission granted, we will merely say that 
the technique of a book page or pages is entirely 
different from the technique of a book section — 
if you know what we mean. 

Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that 
things which a fellow would attempt in a book sec- 
tion he would not essay in a book page or double 
page. Conversely, things that will make a page 
successful may be out of place in a section. It is 
by no means wholly a matter of newspaper make- 
up, though there is that to it, too. But a man with 
a book section, though not necessarily more ambi- 
tious, is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects 
to turn his reporters loose on more books than his 
colleague who has only a page or so to turn around 
in. For another, he will probably want to print a 



ii2 Why Authors Go Wrong 

careful list of all books he receives, of whatever 
sort, with a description of each as adequate as he 
can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus 
title, author, place of publication, publisher and 
price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, book- 
sellers, librarians, readers in search of books on spe- 
cial subjects* — by pretty nearly everybody who reads 
the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality 
of such a list has its value. A woman down in 
Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too 
much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he 
prints, "but the lists of books are delightful"! 
There you are. In editing a book section you must 
be all things to all women. 

The fellow with a page or two has quite other 
preoccupations. Where's a photo, or a cartoon? 
Must have a headline to break the solidity of this 
close-packed column of print. How about a funny 
column? That gifted person, Hey wood Broun, 
taking charge of the book pages of the New York 
Tribune, announces that he is in favor of anything 
that will make book reviewing exciting. Nothing 
can make book reviewing exciting except book re- 
porting and the books themselves; but if Broun is 
looking for excitement he will find it while filling 
the role of a literary editor. Before long he will 
learn that everybody in the world who is not the 
author of a book wants to review books — and some 
who are authors are willing to double in both parts. 



Literary Editors 113 

Also, a considerable number of books are published 
annually in these still United States and a consider- 
able percentage of those published find their way 
to the literary editor. It is no joke to receive, list 
with descriptions and sort out for assignment or 
non-assignment an average of 1,500 volumes a 
year, nor to assign to your book reporters, with as 
much infallibility in choosing the reporter as pos- 
sible, perhaps half of the 1,500. Likewise there 
are assignments which several reporters want, a 
single book bespoken by four persons, maybe; and 
there are book assignments that are received with 
horror or sometimes with unflinching bravery by 
the good soldier. To hand a man, for instance, 
the extremely thick two- volume History of Labour 
in the United States by Professor Commons and his 
associates is like pinning a decoration on him for 
limitless valor under fire — only the decoration bears 
a strong resemblance to the Iron Cross. 

3 

Advertising? 

Newspapers depend upon advertising for their 
existence, let alone their profits, in most instances. 
Of course, if there were no such things as advertise- 
ments we should still have newspapers. The news 
must be had. Presumably people would simply 



H4 Why Authors Go Wrong 

pay more for it, or pay as much in a more direct 
way. 

What is true of newspapers is true of parts of 
newspapers. The fact that a new book is news, 
and, as such, a thing that must more or less widely 
but indispensably be reported, is attested by the 
maintenance of book columns and pages in many 
newspapers where book advertising there is none. 
The people who read the Boston Evening Tr cm- 
script, for example, would hardly endure the aboli- 
tion of its book pages whether publishers used them 
to advertise in or not. 

At the same time the publisher finds, and can 
find, no better medium than a good live book page 
or book section ; nor can he find any other medium, 
nor can any other medium be created, in which his 
advertising will reach his full audience. "The 
trade" reads the excellent Publishers 3 Weekly, li- 
brarians have the journal of the American Library 
Association, readers have the newspapers and mag- 
azines of general circulation on which they rely for 
the news of new books. But the good book page 
or book section reaches all these groups. Publish- 
ers, authors, booksellers, librarians, book buyers — 
all read it. And if it is really good it spreads the 
book reading habit. Even a bookshop seldom does 
that — we have one exception in mind, pretty well 
known. People do not, ordinarily, read in a book- 
shop. 



Literary Editors 115 

Of course a literary editor who has any regard 
for the vitality of his page or section is interested 
in book advertising. There's something wrong 
with him if he isn't. If he isn't he doesn't measure 
up to his job, which is to get people to read books 
and find their way about among them. A book 
page or a book section without advertising is no 
more satisfactory than a man or a woman without 
a sense of the value of money. It looks lopsided 
and it is lopsided. Readers resent it, and rightly. 
It's a beautiful fagade, but the side view is disap- 
pointing. 

The interest the literary editor takes in book 
advertising need no more be limited than the in- 
terest he takes in the growth or improvement of 
any other feature of his page or section. It has 
and can have no relation to his editorial or news 
policy. The moment such a thing is true his use- 
fulness is ended. An alliance between the pen and 
the pocketbook is known the moment it is made 
and is transparent the moment it takes effect in 
print. A literary editor may resent, and keenly, 
as an editor, the fact that Bing, Bang & Company 
do not advertise their books in his domain. He is 
quite right to feel strongly about it. It has nothing 
to do with his handling of the Bing Bang books. 
That is determined by their news value alone. He 
may give the Bing Bang best seller a front page 
review and at the same time decline to meet Mr. 



n6 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Bing or lunch with Mr. Bang. And he will be en- 
tirely honest and justified in his course, both ways. 
Puff & Boom advertise like thunder. The literary 
editor likes them both immensely, or, at least, he 
appreciates their good judgment (necessarily it 
seems good to him in his role as editor of the pages 
they use). But Puff & Boom's books are one-stick 
stories. Well, it's up to Puff & Boom, isn't it? 

Oh, well, first and last there's a lot to being a 
literary editor, new style. But first and last there's 
a lot to being a human. Any one who can be hu- 
man successfully can do the far lesser thing much 
better than any literary editor has yet done it. 



WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER 
KNOWS 



VI 

WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS 

A BIG subject? Not necessarily. Discussed by 
an authority ? No, indeed. On the contrary, 
about to be written upon by an amateur recording 
impressions extending a little over a year but formed 
in several relationships — as a "literary editor," as an 
author and, involuntarily, as an author's agent — but 
all friendly. Also, perhaps, as a pretty regular 
reader of publishers' products. What will first ap- 
pear as vastness in the subject will shrink on a 
moment's examination. For our title is concerned 
only with what every publisher knows. A common 
piece of knowledge; or if not, after all, very "com- 
mon," at least commonly held — -by book publishers. 
To state the main conclusion first: The one 
thing that every publisher knows, so far as a hum- 
ble experience can deduce, is that what is called 
"general" publishing — meaning fiction and other 
books of general appeal — is a highly speculative en- 
terprise and hardly a business at all. The clearest 
analogy seems to be with the theatrical business. 
Producing books and producing plays is terrifyingly 
alike. Full of risks. Requiring, unless genius is 

119 



120 Why Authors Go Wrong 

manifested, considerable money capital. Likely to 
make, and far more likely to lose, small fortunes 
overnight. . . . Fatally fascinating. More an art 
than an organization but usually requiring an organ- 
ization for the exhibition of the most brilliant art 
— like opera. A habit comparable with hasheesh. 
Heart-lifting — and headachy. 'Twas the night be- 
fore publication and all through the house not a 
creature was stirring, not even a stenographer. The 
day dawned bright and clear and a re-order for fifty 
more copies came in the afternoon mail. . . . Ab- 
sentmindedly, the publisher-bridegroom pulled a 
contract instead of the wedding ring from his pocket. 
"With this royalty I thee wed," he murmured. And 
so she was published and they lived happily ever 
after until she left him because he did not clothe 
the children suitably, using green cloth with purple 
stamping. 



A fine old publishing house once went back over 
the record of about 1,200 published books. This 
was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler 
as possible ; its books had placed it, in every respect, 
in the first rank of publishing houses. 

Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any 
sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080 
had either lost money, broken even, or made sums 
smaller than the interest on the money tied up in 



What Every Publisher Knows 121 

them. Most of the 120 profitable books had been 
highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn 
this when you reflect that these lucrative books had 
each to fbot the bill, more or less, for nine others. 
So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay 
behind the figures? In some cases it was possible 
to tell why a particular book had sold. More often 
it wasn't. ... Is this a business? 



Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book pub- 
lished. It's not a bad book, either; very good novel, 
as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jen- 
kinson's publisher takes his next book with a nat- 
ural reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this 
is a better story and has in it elements that prom- 
ise popularity. The publisher's salesman goes on 
the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters 
a bookseller's and begins to talk the new Jenkinson 
novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of 
the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and 
backs away in horror. 

"Stock that?" asks the bookseller rhetorically. 
"Not on your life! Why," with a gesture toward 
one shelf, "there's his first book. Twenty copies 
and only two sold !" 

The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance 
sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, may 



122 Why Authors Go Wrong 

yet call for it when they read a review — not neces- 
sarily a favorable account — or when they see it ad- 
vertised. If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or bi- 
ographies the bookseller's wholly human attitude 
would not much matter. But a novel is different. 
The customer wanting Jenkinson's History of 
France would order it or go elsewhere, most likely. 
The customer wanting Jenkinson's new novel is 
quite often content with Tarkington's instead. 

When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at 
a Broadway show and find they have none left for 
Whoop 'Er Up you grumble, and then buy seats at 
Lefs All Go. Not that you really care. Not that 
any one really cares. The man who produced 
Whoop 'Er Up is also the producer of Lefs All Go, 
both theatres are owned by a single group, the li- 
brettists are one and the same and the music of both 
is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source. 
Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a 
strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write 
Tarkington's novel, the two books are published 
by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only 
the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indif- 
ference over your choice. 



The publisher's salesman comes to the booksell- 
er's lair equipped with dummies. These show the 



What Every Publisher Knows 123 

book's exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding 
and (very important) its jacket. Within the 
dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty 
pages of the book printed over and over to give the 
volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may 
read these twenty pages. If the author has got 
plenty of action into them the bookseller is favor- 
ably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of 
the book upon what the salesman and the publisher's 
catalogue tells him. He has to. He can't read 'em all. 
Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his re- 
marks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story 
called Whispering Wires in which the explanation 
of a mysterious murder depended upon the tele- 
phone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a 
single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the book- 
sellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone 
receiver about the country with him, unscrewing 
and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put 
against your ear and showing how the deed was 
done. 

5 

The bookseller, like every one else, goes by ex- 
perience. It is, or has been, his experience that 
collections of short stories do not sell well. And 
this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and 
Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at 
short story volumes. Where there is a name that 



124 Why Authors Go Wrong 

will command attention — Alice Brown, Theodore 
Dreiser — or where a special appeal is possible, as in 
Edward J. O'Brien's The Best Short Stories of 
ipi-, books made up of short tales may sell. But 
there are depressing precedents. 

In his interesting article on The Publishing Busi- 
ness, appearing in 191 6 in the Publishers' Weekly 
and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites 
Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution as a modern 
instance of a special sort of book finding its own 
very special, but surprisingly large, public. "Nine 
booksellers out of ten 'passed' it when the traveller 
brought it round," observes Mr. Scott. "Fortu- 
nately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of 
the expert, and public attention was secured." Was 
the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not. 
Creative Evolution is nothing to tie up your money 
in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic 
audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel. 

Mr. Scott's article, which is inconclusive, in our 
opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are 
like each other no two books are really the same ar- 
ticle. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp ; 
many books, and here we are by no means limited to 
fiction, have whatever unity comes from the author- 
ship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elu- 
sively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may 
be confined almost wholly to the presence of the 
same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that 



What Every Publisher Knows 125 

The Virginian and The Pentecost of Calamity are 
both the work of Owen Wister. 

No! Two books are most often and emphat- 
ically not the same article. Mr. Scott is wholly 
right when he points out every book should have ad- 
vertising, or other attention, peculiar to itself. A 
method of reporting one book will not do for an- 
other, any more than a publisher's circular describ- 
ing one book will do to describe a second. The art 
of reporting books or other news, like the art of ad- 
vertising books or other commodities, is one of end- 
less differentiation. In the absence of real orig- 
inality, freshness and ideas, both objects go un- 
achieved or else are achieved by speciousness, not to 
say guile. You, for example, do not really believe 
that by reading Hannibal Halcombe's How to Heap 
Up Happiness you will be able to acquire the equiv- 
alent of a college education in 52 weeks. But some- 
where in How to Heap Up Happiness Mr. Halcombe 
tells how he made money or how he learned to en- 
joy pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution 
of his unoriginal domestic troubles — any one of 
which you may crave to know and honest informa- 
tion of which will probably send you after the book. 

6 

At this point in the discussion of our subject we 
have had the incredible folly to look back at our 



126 Why Authors Go Wrong 

outline. Yes, there is an outline — or a thing of 
shreds and patches which once went by that descrip- 
tion. What, you will say, wrecked so soon, after 
a mere introduction of 1,500 words or so? Cer- 
tainly. Outlines are to writers what architects' 
plans are to builders, or what red rags are supposed 
to be to bulls. Or, as the proverbial (our favorite 
adjective) chaff before the wind. Our outline says 
that the subject of selling books should be subdivi- 
sion (c) under division 1 of the three partitions of 
our subject. All Gaul and Poland are not the only 
objects divided in three parts. Every serious sub- 
ject is, likewise. 

Never mind. We shall have to struggle along as 
best we can. We have been talking about selling 
books, or what every publisher knows in regard to 
it. Well, then, every publisher knows that selling 
books as it has mainly to be conducted under pres- 
ent conditions, is just as much a matter of merchan- 
dising as selling bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. 
But this is one of the things that people outside the 
publishing and bookselling businesses seldom grasp. 
A cultural air, for them, invests the book business. 
The curse of the genteel hangs about it. It is al- 
most professional, like medicine and baseball. It 
has an odor, like sanctity. . . . All wrong. 

Bonnets, bathrobes, birdseed, books. All are 
saleable if you go about it right. And how is that? 
you ask. 



What Every Publisher Knows 127 

The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great 
foundational demand for headgear. The best way 
to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best 
way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home. 
It might be supposed that the best way to sell books 
would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be 
far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread 
the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies 
of any particular book. 

Of course every publisher knows this and of 
course all the publishers, associating themselves for 
the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably 
allied to the general welfare, spend time and money 
in the effort to make readers — not of Mrs. Halcyon 
Hunter's Love Has Wings or Mr. Caspar Car- 
touche's Martin the Magnificent, but of books, just 
good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course. . , . 

This would be — beg pardon, is — the thing that 
actually and immediately as well as ultimately 
counts : Let us get people to read, to like to read, 
to enjoy reading, and they will, sooner or later, read 
books. Sooner or later they'll become book readers 
and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as 
well as automobiles. . . . 

On the merely technical side of bookselling, on 
the immediate problem of selling particular new 
novels, collections of short stories, histories, books 
of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, col- 
lectively at least, not much to learn from their fel- 



128 Why Authors Go Wrong 

low merchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and 
birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so 
highly developed in America that many of the meth- 
ods resemble the interchangeable parts of standard- 
ized manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a 
look at these methods. 



The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered 
by at least two American publishing houses. With 
their very large lists of new books they contrive to 
avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. 
While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six 
months ahead, these publishers are moving largely 
but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and 
less largely but with swift certainty three months, 
two months, even one month from the passing mo- 
ment. And they are absolutely right and profit by 
their Tightness. For this reason: Everything that 
is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that 
ephemerality if you like but also that widening rip- 
ple of human interest which is the unique essence of 
what we call "news." This quality is present, in a 
perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of 
printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Dar- 
win's Origin of Species. Oh! exclaims the reader, 
there surely is a book with no ephemerality about 
it! No? But there was an immense quantity of 



What Every Publisher Knows 129 

just that in its publication. It came at the right 
hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone un- 
noticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of 
biological knowledge that Darwin knew not. 

Fifty years, one way or the other, would have 
made a vast difference in the reception, the import, 
the influence of even so epochal a book as The 
Origin of Species. Now a little reflection will show 
that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time 
is far more sharply important. Darwin's book was 
so massive that ten or twenty years either way might 
not have mattered. But in such a case as John 
Spargo's Bolshevism a few months may matter. In 
the case of Mr. Britling the month as well as the 
year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the 
fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a maga- 
zine article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Ar- 
thur Guy Empey was on the very hour with Over 
the Top; but the appearance of his Tales from a 
Dugout a few days after the signing of the armis- 
tice on November 11, 19 18, was one of the minor 
tragedies of the war. 

Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as hu- 
man and mechanical conditions permit, preserve 
flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great 
advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron- 
clad arrangements a half year ahead can be avoided 
the methods of two of the most important Amer- 
ican houses demonstrate. Either can get out a book 



130 Why Authors Go Wrong 

on a month's notice. More than once in a season 
this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000 
and one of 15,000 copies — that is, between not much 
more than "breaking even" and making a handsome 
profit. 

8 

Every book that is published requires advertising 
though perhaps no two books call for advertising 
in just the same way. One of the best American 
publishing houses figures certain sums for adver- 
tising — whatever form it may take — in its costs of 
manufacture and then the individual volumes have 
to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper 
share of the money. Other houses have similar un- 
satisfactory devices for providing an advertising 
fund. The result is too often not unlike the re- 
volving fund with which American railways were 
furnished by Congress — it revolved so fast that 
there wasn't enough to go round long. 

A very big publishing house does differently. To 
the cost of manufacture of each book is added a spe- 
cific, flat and appropriate sum of money to adver- 
tise that particular book. The price of the book is 
fixed accordingly. When the book is published 
there is a definite sum ready to advertise it. No 
book goes unadvertised. If the book "catches on" 
there is no trouble, naturally, about more advertis- 
ing money; if it does not sell the advertising of it 



What Every Publisher Knows 131 

stops when the money set aside has been exhausted 
and the publishers take their loss with a clear con- 
science ; they have done their duty by the book. It 
may be added that this policy has always paid. 
Combined with other distinctive methods it has put 
the house which adopted it in the front rank. 



Whether to publish a small, carefully selected list 
of books in a season or a large and comprehensive 
list is not wholly decided by the capital at the pub- 
lisher's command. Despite the doubling of all costs 
of book manufacture, publishing is not yet an en- 
terprise which requires a great amount of capital, 
as compared with other industries of corresponding 
volume. The older a publishing house the more 
likely it is to restrict its list of new books. It has 
more to lose and less to gain by taking a great num- 
ber of risks in new publications. At the same time 
it is subjected to severe competition because the cap- 
ital required to become a book publisher is not large. 
Hence much caution, too much, no doubt, in many 
cases and every season. Still, promising manu- 
scripts are lamentably few. "Look at the stuff that 
gets published/' is the classic demonstration of the 
case. 

The older the house, the stronger its already ac- 
cumulated list, the more conservative, naturally, it 



132 Why Authors Go Wrong 

becomes, the less inclined to> play with loaded dice 
in the shape of manuscripts. Yet a policy of ex- 
treme caution and conservatism is more dangerous 
and deadly than a dash of the gambler's makeup. 
Two poor seasons together are noticed by the trade ; 
four poor seasons together may put a house badly 
behind. A season with ten books only, all good, 
all selling moderately well, is perhaps more meri- 
torious and more valuable in the long run than a 
season with thirty books, nearly all poor except for 
one or two sensational successes. But the fellow 
who brings out the thirty books and has one or two 
decided best sellers is the fellow who will make large 
profits, attract attention and acquire prestige. It 
is far better to try everything you can that seems to 
have "a chance" than to miss something awfully 
good. And, provided you drop the bad potatoes 
quickly, it will pay you better in the end. 

There must be a big success somewhere on your 
list. A row of respectable and undistinguished 
books is the most serious of defeats. 



10 

Suppose you were a book publisher and had put 
out a novel or two by Author A. with excellent re- 
sults on the profit side of the ledger. Author A. 
is plainly a valuable property, like a copper mine in 
war time. A.'s third manuscript comes along in due 



What Every Publisher Knows 133 

time. It is entirely different from the first two so- 
successful novels; it is pretty certain to disappoint 
A.'s ' 'audience." You canvass the subject with 
A., who can't "see" your arguments and suggestions. 
It comes to this : Either you publish the third novel 
or you lose A. Which, darling reader, would you, 
if you were the publisher, do^ Would you choose 
the lady and The Tiger f 

You are neatly started as a book publisher. You 
can't get advance sales for your productions (to bor- 
row a term from the theatre). You go to Memphis 
and Syracuse and interview booksellers. They say 
to you: "For heaven's sake, get authors whose 
names mean something ! Why should we stock fic- 
tion by Horatius Hotaling when we can dispose of 
125 copies of E. Phillips Oppenheim's latest in ten 
days from publication?" Returning thoughtfully 
to New York, you happen to meet a Celebrated Au- 
thor. Toward the close of luncheon at the Brevoort 
he offers to let you have a book of short stories. 
One of them (it will be the title-story, of course) 
was published in the Saturday Evening Post, bring- 
ing to Mr. Lorimer, the editor, 2,500 letters and 
117 telegrams of evenly divided praise and con- 
demnation. Short stories are a stiff proposition ; but 
the Celebrated Author has a name that will insure 
a certain advance sale and a fame that will insure 
reviewers' attention. For you to become his pub- 
lisher will be as prestigious as it is adventitious. 



134 Why Authors Go Wrong 

From ethical and other motives, you seek out the 
C. A.'s present publisher — old, well-established house 
— and inquire if Octavo & Duodecimo will have any 
objection to your publishing the C. A.'s book of 
tales. Mr. Octavo replies in friendly accents : 

"Not a bit! Not a bit! Go to it! However, 
we've lent . . . (the C. A.) $2,500 at one time or 
another in advance moneys on a projected novel. 
Travel as far as you like with him, but remember 
that he can't give you a novel until he has given us 
one or has repaid that $2,500." 

What to do? Tis indeed a pretty problem. If 
you pay Octavo & Duodecimo $2,500 you can have 
the C. A.'s next novel — worth several times as much 
as any book of tales, at the least. On the other 
hand, there is no certainty that the C. A. will de- 
liver you the manuscript of a novel. He has been 
going to deliver it to Octavo & Duodecimo for three 
years. And you can't afford to tie up $2,500 on 
the chance that he'll do for you what he hasn't done 
for them. Because $2,500 is, to you, a lot of money. 

In the particular instance where this happened 
(except for details, we narrate an actual occur- 
rence) the beginning publisher went ahead and pub- 
lished the book of tales, and afterward another book 
of tales, and let Octavo & Duodecimo keep their 
option on the C. A.'s next novel, if he ever writes 
any. The probabilities are that the C. A. will write 
short stories for the rest of his life rather than de- 



What Every Publisher Knows 135 

liver a novel from which he will receive not one cent 
until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties. 



11 

English authors are keenest on advance money. 
The English writer who will undertake to do a book 
without some cash in hand before putting pen to 
paper is a great rarity. An American publisher who 
wants English manuscripts and goes to London 
without his checkbook won't get anywhere. A little 
real money will go far. It will be almost unneces- 
sary for the publisher who has it to entrain for those 
country houses where English novelists drink tea 
and train roses. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, York- 
shire, Wessex, &c, will go down to London. Mr. 
Britling will motor into town to talk about a con- 
tract. All the London clubs will be named as ren- 
dezvous. Visiting cards will reach the publisher's 
hotel, signifying the advent of Mr. Percival Foth- 
eringay of Houndsditch, Bayswater, Wapping Old 
Stairs, London, B. C. Ah, yes, Fotheringay; won- 
derful stories of Whitechapel and the East End, 
really ! Knows the people — what ? 

It has to be said that advances on books seem to 
retard their delivery. We have in mind a famous 
English author (though he might as well be Amer- 
ican, so far as this particular point is concerned) 
who got an advance of $500 (wasn't it?) some years 



136 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ago from Quarto & Folio — on a book of essays. 
Quarto & Folio have carried that title in their spring 
and fall catalogues of forthcoming books ever since. 
Spring and fall they despair afresh. Daylight sav- 
ing did nothing to help them — an hour gained was 
a mere bagatelle in the cycles of time through which 
Fads and Fatalities keeps moving in a regular and 
always equidistant orbit. If some day the League 
of Nations shall ordain that the calendar be set 
ahead six months Quarto & Folio may get the com- 
pleted manuscript of Fads and Fatalities. 

American authors are much less insistent on ad- 
vance payments than their cousins 3,000 miles re- 
moved. A foremost American publishing house has 
two inflexible rules : No advance payments and no 
verdict on uncompleted manuscripts. Inflexible — 
but it is to be suspected that though this house never 
bends the rule there are times when it has to break 
it. What won't bend must break. There are a few 
authors for whom any publisher will do anything 
except go to- jail. Probably you would make the 
same extensive efforts to retain your exclusive 
rights in a South African diamond digging which 
had already produced a bunch of Kohinoors. 



12 

There is a gentleman's agreement among pub- 
lishers, arrived at some years back, not to indulge 



What Every Publisher Knows 137 

in cutthroat competition for each other's authors. 
This ethical principle, like most ethical principles 
now existing, is dictated quite as much by considera- 
tions of keeping a whole skin as by a sense of pro- 
fessional honor. There are some men in the book 
publishing business whose honorable standards have 
a respect for the other fellow's property first among 
their Fourteen Points. There are others who are 
best controlled by a knowledge that to do so-and-so 
would be very unhealthy for themselves. 

The agreement, like most unwritten laws, is in- 
terpreted with various shadings. Some of these are 
subtle and some of them are not. It is variously 
applied by different men in different cases, some- 
times unquestionably and sometimes doubtfully. 
But in the main it is pretty extensively and strictly 
upheld, in spirit as in letter. 

How far it transgresses authors' privileges or 
limits authors' opportunities would be difficult to 
say. In the nature of the case, any such under- 
standing must operate to some extent to lessen the 
chances of an author receiving the highest possible 
compensation for his work. Whether this is offset 
by the favors and concessions, pecuniary and other- 
wise, made to an author by a publisher to whom he 
adheres, can't be settled. The relation of author 
and publisher, at best, calls for, and generally elicits, 
striking displays of loyalty on both sides. Partial- 



138 Why Authors Go Wrong 

larly among Americans, the most idealistic people 
on earth. 

In its practical working this publishers' under- 
standing operates to prevent any publisher "ap- 
proaching" an author who has an accepted publisher 
of his books. Unless you, as a publisher, are your- 
self approached by Author B., whose several books 
have been brought out by Publisher C, you are 
theoretically bound hand and foot. And even if 
Author B. comes to you there are circumstances un- 
der which you may well find it desirable to talk 
B.'s proposal over with C, hitherto his publisher. 
After that talk you may wish B. were in Halifax. 
If everybody told the truth matters would be greatly 
simplified. Or would they? 

If you hear that Author D., who writes very good 
sellers, is dissatisfied with Publisher F., what is your 
duty in the circumstances? Author D. may not 
come to you, for there are many publishers for such 
as he to choose from. Shall we say it is your duty 
to acquaint D., indirectly perhaps, with the manifest 
advantages of bringing you his next novel? We'll 
say so. 

Whatever publishers agree to, authors are free. 
And every publisher knows how easy it is to lose 
an author. Why, they leave you like that ! ( Busi- 
ness of snapping fingers.) And for the lightest rea- 
sons! (Register pain or maybe mourn fulness.) If 
D. W. Griffith wanted to make a Movie of a Pub- 



What Every Publisher Knows 139 

lisher Losing an Author he would find the action 
too swift for the camera to record. Might as well 
try to film The Birth of a Notion. 



13 

One of the most fascinating mysteries about pub- 
lishers, at least to authors, is the method or meth- 
ods by which they determine the availability of 
manuscripts. Fine word, availability. Noncom- 
mittal and all that. It has no taint of infallibility 
— which is the last attribute a publisher makes pre- 
tensions to. 

There are places where one man decides whether 
a manuscript will do and there are places where it 
takes practically the whole clerical force and several 
plebiscites to accept or reject the author's offering. 
One house which stands in the front rank in this 
country accepts and rejects mainly on the verdicts 
of outsiders — specialists, however, in various fields. 
Another foremost publishing house has a special 
test for "popular" novels in manuscript. An extra 
ration of chewing gum is served out to all the ste- 
nographers and they are turned loose on the type- 
written pages. If they react well the firm signs a 
contract and prints a first edition of from 5,000 to 
25,000 copies, depending on whether it is a first 
novel or not and the precise comments of the girls 
at page 378. 



140 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Always the sales manager reads the manuscript, 
if it is at all seriously considered. What he says 
has much weight He's the boy who will have to 
sell the book to the trade and unless he can see things 
in it, or can be got to, there is practically no hope 
despite Dr. Munyon's index finger. 

Recently a publishing house of national reputa- 
tion has done a useful thing — we are not prepared 
to say it is wholly new — by establishing a liaison 
officer. This person does not pass on manuscripts, 
unless incidentally by way of offering his verdict 
to be considered with the verdicts of other depart- 
ment heads. But once a manuscript has been ac- 
cepted by the house it goes straight to this man who 
reads it intensively and sets down, on separate 
sheets, everything about it that might be useful to 
(a) the advertising manager, (b) the sales manager 
and his force, and (c) the editorial people handling 
the firm's book publicity effort. 



14 

A little knowledge of book publishing teaches im- 
mense humility. The number of known instances 
in which experienced publishers have erred in judg- 
ment is large. Authors always like to hear of these. 
But too much must not be deduced from them. 
Every one has heard of the rejection of Henry Syd- 
nor Harrison's novel Queed. Many have heard of 



What Every Publisher Knows 141 

the publisher who decided not to "do" Vicente 
Blasco Ibafiez's The Four Horsemen of the Apoc- 
alypse. There was more than one of him, by the 
way, and in each case he had an exceedingly bad 
translation to take or reject (we are told), the only 
worthy translation, apparently, being that which was 
brought out with such sensational success in the 
early fall of 191 8. A publisher lost Spoon River 
Anthology because of a delay in acceptance — he 
wanted the opinion of a confrere not easily reached. 
For every publisher's mistake of this sort there could 
probably be cited an instance of perspicacity much 
more striking. Such was the acceptance of Edward 
Lucas White's El Supremo after many rejections. 
And how about the publisher who accepted Queedf 



15 

Let us conclude these haphazard and very likely 
unhelpful musings on an endless subject by telling a 
true story. 

In the spring of 19 19 one of the principal publish- 
ing houses in America and England undertook the 
publication of a very unusual sort of a novel, semi- 
autobiographical, a work of love and leisure by a 
man who had gained distinction as an executive. It 
was a fine piece of work, though strange; had a de- 
lightful reminiscential quality. The book was made 
up, a first edition of moderate size printed and 



142 Why Authors Go Wrong 

bound. It was not till this had been done and the 
book was ready to place on sale that the head of this 
publishing house had an opportunity to read it. 

The Head is a veteran publisher famous for his 
prescience in the matter of manuscripts and for hon- 
orable dealings. 

He read the book through and was charmed by 
it; he looked at the book and was unhappy. He 
sent for everybody who had had to do with the mak- 
ing of this book. He held up his copy and flut- 
tered pages and said, in effect: 

"This has been done all wrong. Here is a book 
of quite exceptional quality. I don't think it will 
sell. Only moderately, though perhaps rather stead- 
ily for some years to come. It won't make us 
money. To speak of. But it deserves, intrin- 
sically, better treatment. Better binding. This is 
only ordinary six-months' -selling novel binding. It 
deserves larger type. Type with a more beautiful 
face. Fewer lines to the page. Lovelier dress 
from cover to cover. 

"Throw away the edition that has been printed. 
Destroy it or something. At least, hide it. Don't 
let any of it get out. For this has been done wrong, 
all wrong. Do it over." 

So they went away from his presence and did it 
right. It meant throwing away about $2,000. Or 
was it a $2,000 investment in the good opinion of 
people who buy, read and love books ? 



THE SECRET OF THE BEST 
SELLER 



VII 



THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER 

BY "best seller" we may mean one of several 
things. Dr. Emmet t Holt's Care and Feed- 
ing of Children, of which the fifty-eighth edition 
was printed in the spring of 191 9, is one kind of 
best seller; Owen Wister's The Virginian is quite 
another. The number of editions of a book is a 
very uncertain indication of sales to a person not 
familiar with book publishing. Editions may con- 
sist of as few as 500 copies or as many as 25,000 
or even 50,000. The advance sale of Gene Strat- 
ton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land was, if we re- 
call the figure exactly, 150,000 copies. These, 
therefore, were printed and distributed by the day 
when the book was placed on sale, or shortly there- 
after. To call this the "first edition" would be 
rather meaningless. 

One thousand copies of a book of poems — unless 
it be an anthology — is a large edition indeed. But 
not for Edgar Guest, whose books sell in the tens 
of thousands. The sale, within a couple of years, 
of 31,000 copies of the poems of Alan Seeger was 
phenomenal. 

145 



146 Why Authors Go Wrong 

The first book of essays of an American writer 
sold 6,000 copies within six months of its publi- 
cation. This upset most precedents of the book- 
selling trade. The author's royalties may have 
been $1,125. A few hundred dollars should be 
added to represent money received for the casual 
publication of the essays in magazines before their 
appearance in the book. Of course the volume did 
not stop selling at the end of six months. 

Compare these figures, however, with the income 
of one of the most popular American novelists. A 
single check for $75,000. Total payments, over a 
period of fifteen years, of $750,000 to $1,000,000. 
Yet it is doubtful if the books of this novelist 
reached more than 65 per cent, of their possible 
audience. 

It is a moderate estimate, in our opinion, that 
most books intended for the "general reader," 
whether fiction or not, do not reach more than one- 
quarter of the whole body of readers each might 
attain. With the proper machinery of publicity 
and merchandising book sales in the United States 
could be quadrupled. We share this opinion with 
Harry Blackman Sell of the Chicago Daily News 
and were interested to find it independently con- 
firmed by James H. Collins who, writing in the Sat- 
urday Evening Post of May 3, 19 19, under the head- 
ing When Merchandise Sells Itself, said : 

"Book publishing is one industry that suffers for 



The Best Seller 147 



lack of retail outlets. Even the popular novel sells 
in numbers far below the real buying power of this 
nation of readers, because perhaps 25 per cent, of 
the public can examine it and buy it at the city book 
stores, while it is never seen by the rest of the public. 

"For lack of quantity production based on wide 
retail distribution the novel sells for a dollar and 
a half. 

"But for a dollar you can buy a satisfactory 
watch. 

"That is made possible by quantity production. 
Quantity production of dollar watches is based on 
their sale in 50,000 miscellaneous shops, through 
the standard stock and the teaching of modern mer- 
cantile methods. Book publishers have made ex- 
periments with the dollar novel, but it sold just 
about the same number of copies as the $1.50 novel, 
because only about so many fiction buyers were 
reached through the bookstores. Now the stand- 
ard-stock idea is being applied to books, with assort- 
ments of 50 or 100 proved titles carried by the drug- 
gist and stationer. ,, 



Speaking rather offhandedly, we are of opinion 
that not more than two living American writers of 
fiction have achieved anything like a 100 per cent. 



148 Why Authors Go Wrong 

sale of their books. These are Harold Bell Wright 
and Gene Stratton-Porter. 

I am indebted to Mr. Frank K. Reilly, president 
of the Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago, selling 
agents for the original editions of all Mr. Wright's 
books, for the following figures : 

"We began/' wrote Mr. Reilly, "with That 
Printer of Udell's — selling, as I remember the fig- 
ures, about 20,000. Then The Shepherd of the 
Hills — about 100,000, I think. Then the others in 
fast growing quantities. For The Winning of 
Barbara Worth we took four orders in advance 
which totalled nearly 200,000 copies. On When a 
Man's a Man we took the biggest single order ever 
placed for a novel at full price — that is, a cloth- 
bound, 'regular' $1.35 book — 250,000 copies from 
the Western News Company. The advance sale of 
this 19 1 6 book was over 465,000." 

Mr. Reilly wrote at the beginning of March, 
1919, from French Lick, Indiana. At that time 
Mr. Wright's publishers had in hand a novel, The 
Re-Creation of Brian Kent, published August 21, 
19 19. They had arranged for a first printing of 
750,000 copies and were as certain of selling 500,- 
000 copies before August 1 as you are of going to 
sleep some time in the next twenty-four hours. It 
was necessary to make preparations for the sale of 
1,000,000 copies of the new novel before August 
21, 1920. 



The Best Seller 149 



The sale of 1,000,000 copies of The Re-Creation 
of Brian Kent within a year of publication may be 
said to achieve a 100 per cent, circulation so far as 
existing book merchandising facilities allow. 

The sale, within ten years, of 670,733 copies of 
Gene Stratton-Porter's story, Freckles, approaches 
a 100 per cent, sale but with far too much retarda- 
tion. 



How has the 100 per cent, sale for the Harold 
Bell Wright books been brought within hailing dis- 
tance ? 

Before us lies a circular which must have been 
mailed to most booksellers in the United States 
early in the spring of 1919. It is headed: "First 
Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Cam- 
paign." Below this legend is an advertisement of 
The Re-Creation of Brian Kent. Below that is a 
statement that the advertisement will appear, simul- 
taneously with the book's publication, in "magazines 
and national and religious weeklies having millions 
upon millions of circulation. In addition to this 
our newspaper advertising will cover all of the larger 
cities of the United States." Then follows a list 
of "magazines, national and religious weeklies cov- 
ered by our signed advertising contracts." 

There are 132 of them. The range is from the 
Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic to Vanity 



150 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Fair and Town Topics in one slant; from System 
and Physical Culture to Zioris Herald and the 
Catholic News; from Life to Needlecraft; from the 
Photoplay World to the GirVs Companion; from the 
Outlook to the Lookout — and to and fro and back 
and forth in a web covering all America between 
the two Portlands. 

There are about 140,000,000 persons in the 
United States and Great Britain together. Over 
100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a Har- 
old Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright 
movie. 

The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright's books, so 
far as the external factor is concerned, resides in 
the fact that his stories have been brought to the 
attention of thousands upon thousands who, from 
one year's end to the other, never have a new book 
of fiction thrust upon their attention by advertising 
or by sight of the book itself. 



We speak of the "external factor." There is an 
external factor quite as much as an internal factor 
in the success of every best seller of whatever sort. 
The tendency of everybody who gives any atten- 
tion to the subject, but particularly the book pub- 
lisher, is to study the internal factor almost to the 
exclusion of the other. What, you naturally ask 



The Best Seller 151 

yourself, are the qualities in this book that have 
made it sell so remarkably? 

The internal factor is important. Its impor- 
tance, doubtless, cannot be overrated. But it is not 
the whole affair. Before we go further let us lay 
down some general principles that are not often 
formulated clearly enough even in the minds of 
those to whom they import most. 

1. The internal factor — certain qualities of the 
book itself — predetermines its possible audience. 

2. The external factor — the extent to which it is 
brought to public attention, the manner in which 
it is presented to the public, the ubiquity of copies 
for sale — determines its actual audience. 

3. The internal factor can make a best seller of 
a book with almost no help from the external fac- 
tor, but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale. 

4. The external factor cannot make a big seller 
where the internal factor is not of the right sort; 
but it can always give a 100 per cent. sale. 

5. The internal factor is only partly in the pub- 
lisher's control; the external factor is entirely con- 
trollable by the publisher. 

There are two secrets of the best seller. One 
resides in the book itself, the other rests in the man- 
ner of its exploitation. One is inherent, the other 
is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by 
the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book 
possessing certain qualities in a sufficient degree will 



152 Why Authors Go Wrong 

sell heavily anyway, it is human nature to hunt 
ceaselessly for this thing which will triumph over 
every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a 
lazy way to do. It is not good business. It can- 
not, ultimately, pay. The successful book pub- 
lisher of the future is going to be the publisher who 
works for a 100 per cent, sale on all his books. 
When he gets a book with an internal factor which 
would make it a best seller anyway, it will simply 
mean that he will have to exert himself markedly 
less to get a 100 per cent, result. He will have 
such best sellers and will make large sums of money 
with them, but they will be incidents and not 
epochal events; for practically all his books will be 
good sellers. 



Before we go on to a discussion of the internal 
factor of the best seller we want to stress once more, 
and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal 
attention it should receive. The first year and the 
second summer are fatal to far too many books as 
well as humans. And this is true despite the dif- 
ferences between the two. If 100,000 copies rep- 
resent the 100 per cent, sale of a given volume you 
may declare that it makes no difference whether 
that sale is attained in six months or six years. 
From the business standpoint of a quick turnover 
six months is a dozen times better, you may argue ; 



The Best Seller 153 



and if interest on invested money be thought of as 
compounding, the apparent difference in favor of 
the six-months' sale is still more striking. This 
would perhaps be true if the author's next book 
could invariably be ready at the end of the six- 
months' period. Other ifs will occur to those with 
some knowledge of the publishing business and a 
moderate capacity for reflection. 

Most books are wrongly advertised and inade- 
quately advertised, and rather frequently advertised 
in the wrong places. 

Of the current methods of advertising new fic- 
tion only one is unexceptionably good. This is the 
advertising which arrests the reader's attention and 
baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining 
the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts 
the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the 
hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few 
swift strokes some exciting episode of the action — 
ending with a question that will stick in the reader's 
mind. Such an advertisement should always have 
a drawing or other illustration if possible. It 
should be displayed in a generous space and should 
be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as 
to where it is to appear. 

A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, 
but not in use at all despite its assured selling power 
would consist of the simple reproduction of a photo- 
graphed page of the book. The Detroit News has 



154 Why Authors Go Wrong 

used such reproduced pages so effectively as illus- 
trations that it seems strange no publisher (so far 
as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages, 
and pages containing not merely objective thrill but 
the flavor which makes the fascination of a par- 
ticular book, can be found in most novels. The 
Detroit News selected a page of the highest effec- 
tiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Con- 
rad's The Arrow of Gold. This manner of adver- 
tising, telling from its complete restraint, is ap- 
plicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays 
by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken 
not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the 
charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of 
encyclopaedias have long employed this "page-from- 
the-book" method of advertisement with the best 
results. 

The ordinary advertisement of a book, making 
a few flat assertions of the book's extraordinary 
merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventional- 
ized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear 
forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically de- 
fective in that it tries to coerce attention and cre- 
dence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or 
arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not differ- 
ent, essentially, from the public speaker. The pub- 
lic speaker who aims to compel attention by mere 
thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no 
chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, 



The Best Seller 155 



or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his au- 
ditors' curiosity or kindles their collective imagina- 
tion. 

There is too little personality in the advertising 
of books, and when we say personality we mean, 
in most cases, the author's personality. The bald 
and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the 
Westminster Gazette, that this is a book every An- 
glo-American should read, is as nothing compared 
with a few dozen words that could have been writ- 
ten of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells. 

The internal factor of H. G. Wells's novel The 
Undying Fire is so big that it constitutes a sort of 
a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and 
fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 
per cent, sale of the book, under existing merchan- 
dising conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the 
very least. It ought to be advertised in every na- 
tional and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation 
or over in the United States, and in every periodical 
of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And 
it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner : 

Shall Man Curse God and Die? 

No! Job Answered 

No! H. G. Wells Tells Stricken Europe 

Read His New Short Novel, "The Undying Fire" 

in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men 



156 Why Authors Go Wrong 

May Yet Unite to Organize the World and 
Save Mankind from Extinction 

Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the 
unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the 
social instinct which has its roots in thousands of 
years of human history, cannot fail. 



Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said, 
and they are inadequately advertised, by which we 
mean in too few places; and perhaps "insufficiently 
advertised" had been a more accurate phrase. 

It is correct and essential to advertise books in 
periodicals appealing wholly or partly to book read- 
ers. It is just as essential to recruit readers. 

Book readers can be recruited just as magazine 
readers are recruited. The most important way 
of getting magazine readers is still the subscription 
agent. Every community of any size in these 
United States should have in it a man or woman 
of at least high school education and alert enthusi- 
asm selling books of all the publishers. Where 
there is a good bookstore such an agent is unneces- 
sary or may be found in the owner of the store or 
an employee thereof. Most communities cannot 
support a store given over entirely to bookselling. 
In them let there be agents giving their whole time 



The Best Seller 157 



or their spare time and operating with practically 
no overhead expense. Where the agents receive 
salaries these must be paid jointly by all the pub- 
lishers whose books they handle. This should nat- 
urally be done through a central bureau or selling 
agency. Efficient agencies already exist. 

The "book agent" is a classical joke. He is a 
classical joke because he peddled one book, and the 
wrong sort of a book, from door to door. You 
must equip him with fifty books, new and alluring, 
of all publishers ; and arm him with sheets and cir- 
culars describing enticingly a hundred others. He 
must know individuals and their tastes and must 
have one or more of the best book reviewing period- 
icals in the country. He must have catalogues and 
news notes and special offers to put over. If he 
gives you all his time he must have assurance of a 
living, especially until he has a good start or ex- 
hibits his incapacity for pioneering. He must have 
an incentive above and beyond any salary that may 
be paid him. 

But the consideration of details in this place is im- 
possible. The structural outline and much adapt- 
able detail is already in highly successful use by 
periodicals of many sorts. In fundamentals it re- 
quires no profounder skill than that of the clever 
copyist. 



158 Why Authors Go Wrong 



We charged in the third count of our indictment 
that books are rather frequently advertised in the 
wrong places. We had in mind the principle that 
for every book considerable enough to get itself 
published by a publisher of standing there is, some- 
where, a particular audience; just as there is a cer- 
tain body of readers for every news item of enough 
moment to get printed in a daily newspaper. A 
juster way of expressing the trouble would be this : 
Books are rather frequently not advertised in the 
right places. 

The clues to the right places must be sought in 
the book itself and its authorship, always ; and they 
are innumerable. As no two books are alike the 
best thing to do will be to take a specific example. 
Harry Lauder's A Minstrel in France will serve. 

The first and most obvious thing to do is to ad- 
vertise it in every vaudeville theatre in America. 
Wherever the programme includes motion pictures 
flash the advertisement on the screen with a fifteen 
second movie of Lauder himself. Posters and cir- 
culars in the lobby must serve if there are no screen 
pictures. 

The next and almost equally obvious thing is to 
have Lauder make a phonograph record of some 
particularly effective passage in the book, market- 
ing the record in the usual way, at a popular price. 



The Best Seller 159 



Newspaper and magazine advertising must be used 
heavily and must be distributed on the basis of cir- 
culation almost entirely. 

8 

The external factor in the success of the best 
seller is so undeveloped and so rich in possibilities 
that one takes leave of it with regret ; but we must 
go on to some consideration of the internal factor 
that makes for big sales — the quality or qualities in 
the book itself. 

Without going into a long and elaborate inves- 
tigation of best-seller books, sifting and reasoning 
until we reach rock bottom, we had better put down 
a few dogmas. These, then, are the essentials of 
best-selling fiction so far as our observation and 
intellect has carried us : 

1. A good story; which means, as a rule, plenty 
of surface action but always means a crisis in the 
affairs of one or two most-likable characters, a crisis 
that is satisfactorily solved. 

Mark the italicized word. Not a * 'happy end- 
ing" in the twisted sense in which that phrase is 
used. Always a happy ending in the sense in which 
we say, "That was a happy word" — meaning a fit 
word, the "mot just" of the French. Always a 
fitting ending, not always a "happy ending" in the 
sense of a pleasant ending. The ending of Mr. 



160 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Britling Sees It Through is not pleasant, but fitting 
and, to the majority of readers, uplifting, ennobling, 
fine. 

2. Depths below the surface action for those who 
care to plumb them. 

No piece of fiction can sell largely unless it has 
a region of philosophy, moral ideas — whatever you 
will to call it — for those who crave and must have 
that mental immersion. The reader must not be 
led beyond his depth but he must be able to go into 
deep water and swim as far as his strength will 
carry him if he so desires. 

3. The ethical, social and moral implications of 
the surface action must, in the end, accord with the 
instinctive desires of mankind. This is nothing like 
as fearful as it sounds, thus abstractly stated. 
The instinctive desires of men are pretty well 
known. Any psychologist can tell you what they 
are. They are few, primitive and simple. They 
have nothing to do with man's reason except that 
man, from birth to death, employs his reason in 
achieving the satisfaction of these instincts. The 
two oldest and most firmly implanted are the in- 
stinct for self-preservation and the instinct to per- 
petuate the race. The social instinct, much younger 
than either, is yet thousands upon thousands of years 
old and quite as ineradicable. 

Because it violates the self -preservative instinct 
no story of suicide can have a wide human audience 



The Best Seller 161 



unless, in the words of Dick at the close of Mase- 
field's Lost Endeavour, we are filled with the feel- 
ing that "life goes on." The act of destruction 
must be, however blindly, an act of immolation on 
the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we get 
in reading Jack London's largely autobiographical 
Martin Eden; and in a much more striking instance, 
the terrible act that closed the life of the heroine 
in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina falls well before the 
end of the book. In Anna Karenina, as in War and 
Peace, the Russian novelist conveys to every reader 
an invincible conviction of the unbreakable con- 
tinuity of the life of the race. The last words of 
Anna Karenina are not those which describe Anna's 
death under the car wheels but the infinitely hope- 
ful words of Levin : 

"I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach- 
man, and get into useless discussions, and express 
my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blam- 
ing my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at 
once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between 
the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls 
of others, even my wife's. I shall continue to pray 
without being able to explain to myself why. But 
my whole life, every moment of my life, independ- 
ently of whatever may happen to me, will be, not 
meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning 
which I shall have the power to impress upon it." 



1 62 Why Authors Go Wrong 



It is because they appeal so strongly and simply 
and directly to our instinctive desires that the stories 
of Jack London are so popular; it is their perfect 
appeal to our social instinct that makes the tales 
of O. Henry sell thousands of copies month after 
month. Not even Dickens transcended O. Henry 
in the perfection of this appeal; and O. Henry set 
the right value on Dickens as at least one of his 
stories shows. 

Civilization and education refine man's instinc- 
tive desires, modify the paths they take, but do not 
weaken them perceptibly from generation to gen- 
eration except in a few individual cases. Read the 
second chapter of Harold Bell Wright's The Shep- 
herd of the Hills and observe the tremendous call 
to the instinct of race perpetuation, prefaced by a 
character's comment on the careless breeding of man 
as contrasted with man's careful breeding of ani- 
mals. And if you think the appeal is crude, be very 
sure of this : The crudity is in yourself, in the in- 
stinct that you are not accustomed to have set vi- 
brating with such healthy vigor. 

10 

All this deals with broadest fundamentals. But 
they are what the publisher, judging his manuscript, 



The Best Seller 163 

must fathom. They are deeper down than the sales 
manager need go, or the bookseller; deeper than 
the critic need ordinarily descend in his examina- 
tion into the book's qualities. 

Ordinarily it will be enough for the purpose to 
analyze a story along the lines of human instinct 
as it has been modified by our society and our sur- 
roundings and conventionalized by habit. The pub- 
lishers of Eleanor H. Porter's novel Oh, Money! 
Money! were not only wholly correct but quite suf- 
ficiently acute in their six reasons for predicting — 
on the character of the story alone — a big sale. 

The first of these was that the yarn dealt with the 
getting and spending of money, "the most interest- 
ing subject in the world," asserted the publishers — 
and while society continues to be organized on its 
present basis their assertion is, as regards great 
masses of mankind, a demonstrable fact. 

The second reason was allied to the first; the 
story would "set every reader thinking how he 
would spend the money." And the third : it was a 
Cinderella story, giving the reader "the joy of 
watching a girl who has never been fairly treated 
come out on top in spite of all odds." This is a 
powerful appeal to the modified instinct of self- 
preservation. The fourth reason — "the scene is laid 
in a little village and the whole book is a gem of 
country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy" — an- 
swers to the social hunger in the human heart. 



164 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Fifth : "A charming love theme with a happy end- 
ing." Sixth: "The story teaches an unobtrusive 
lesson . . . that happiness must come from within, 
and that money cannot buy it." To go behind such 
reasons is, for most minds, not to clarify but to con- 
fuse. Folks feel these things and care nothing 
about the source of the river of feeling. 



11 

With the non-fictional book the internal factor 
making for large sales is as diverse as the kinds 
of non-fictional volumes. A textbook on a hitherto 
untreated subject of sudden interest to many thou- 
sands of readers has every prospect of a large sale ; 
but this is not the kind of internal factor that a 
publisher is likely to err in judging! Any alert 
business man acquiring correct information will 
profit by such an opportunity. 

But there is a book called In Tune with the In- 
finite, the work of a man named Ralph Waldo 
Trine, which has sold, at this writing, some 530,000 
copies, having been translated into eighteen lan- 
guages. A man has been discovered sitting on the 
banks of the Yukon reading it ; it has been observed 
in shops and little railway stations in Burmah and 
Ceylon. This is what is called, not at all badly, an 
"inspirational book." Don't you think a publisher 
might well have erred in judging that manuscript? 



The Best Seller 165 

Mr. Trine's booklet, The Greatest Thing Ever 
Known, has sold 160,000 copies; his book What 
All the World's A-Seeking, is in its 138,000th. It 
will not do to overlook the attractiveness of these 
titles. What, most people will want to know, is 
"the greatest thing ever known" ? And it is human 
to suppose that what you are seeking is what all the 
world is after, and to want to read a book that holds 
out an implied promise to help you get it. 

The tremendous internal factor of these books 
of Mr. Trine's is that they articulate simple (but 
often beautiful) ideas that lie in the minds of hun- 
dreds of thousands of men and women, ideas un- 
formulated and by the hundred thousand unutter- 
able. For any man who can say the thing that is 
everywhere felt, the audience is limitless. 

In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible 
unless the narrative has the fundamental qualities 
we have designated as necessary in the fictional best 
seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories 
that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and 
this is the fact with such diverse revelations as those 
of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini, Jean 
Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of 
the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in 
favor of normal human existences. For this rea- 
son the predetermined audience of Mr. Tarking- 
ton's Conquest of Canaan is many times greater 
than that of Mr. Dreiser's Sister Carrie. A mo- 



1 66 Why Authors Go Wrong 

merit's reflection will show that this is inevitable, 
since these instinctive desires of ours are so many 
resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and 
combining, in a period of years, to make a single 
resultant force impelling us to lead normal, sane, 
"healthy" and wholesome lives. On such lives, 
lived by the vast majority of men and women every- 
where, the security of every form of human soci- 
ety depends ; indeed, the continued existence of man 
on the face of the earth is dependent upon them. 
You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bash- 
kirtseff, even Franklin and Henry Adams, led ex- 
istences far from normal. The answer is that we 
accept the stories of their lives in fact where we 
(or most of us) would never accept them in fic- 
tion. We know that these lives were lived ; and the 
very circumstance that they were abnormal lives 
makes us more eager to know about and understand 
them. What most of us care for most is such a 
recital as Hamlin Garland's A Son of the Middle 
Border. The secret of the influence of the life of 
Abraham Lincoln upon the American mind and 
the secret of the appeal made by Theodore Roose- 
velt, the man, to his countrymen in general during 
his lifetime is actually one and the same — the tri- 
umph of normal lives, lived normally, lived up to 
the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything else 
contemporary with them. Such men vindicate com- 
mon lives, however humbly lived. We see, as in 



The Best Seller 167 



an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us may be- 
come; and in so far as any one of us has become so 
great we all of us share in his greatness. 

12 

But perhaps the greatest element in predetermin- 
ing the possible audience for a non-fiction book is 
its timeliness. Important, often enough, in the case 
of particular novels, the matter of timeliness is much 
more so with all other books soever. It cannot be 
overlooked in autobiography; The Education of 
Henry Adams attracted a great host of readers in 

19 18 and 1 9 1 9 because it became accessible to them 
in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and 

1919 the minds of men were peculiarly troubled. 
Especially about education. H. G. Wells was ar- 
ticulating the disastrous doubts that beset numbers 
of us, first, in Joan and Peter, with its subtitle, The 
Story of an Education, drawing up an indictment 
which, whatever its bias, distortion and unfairness 
yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in 
The Undying Fire, dedicated "to all schoolmasters 
and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the 
world," returning to the subject, but this time con- 
structively. Yes, a large number of persons were 
thinking about education in 191 8- 19, and the iron- 
ical attitude of Henry Adams toward his own was 
of keenest interest to them. 



1 68 Why Authors Go Wrong 

13 

We have discussed the internal factor which 
makes for a big sale in books rather sketchily be- 
cause, as a whole, book publishers can tell it when 
they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may 
puzzle authors who haven't mastered it. So far as 
authors are concerned we believe that this factor can, 
in many instances, be mastered. The enterprise is 
not different from developing a retentive memory, 
or skill over an audience in public speaking; but as 
with both these achievements no short cut is really 
possible and advice and suggestion (you can't hon- 
estly call it instruction) can go but a little way. No 
end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of 
what it is in books that makes them sell well, and 
nonsense will not cease to be uttered about it while 
men write. What is of vastly more consequence 
than any effort to exploit the internal factor in best 
sellers is the failure to make every book published 
sell its best. If, in general, books sell not more than 
one-quarter the number of copies they should sell, 
an estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate 
and largest gain to publishers, authors and public 
will be in securing 100 per cent, sales. 

14 

A word in closing about the familiar argument 
that the habits of our people have changed, that 



The Best Seller 169 



they no longer have time to read books, that motor- 
ing and movies have usurped the place of reading. 

Intercommunication is not a luxury but a neces- 
sity. Transportation is only a means of intercom- 
munication. As the means of intercommunication 
— books, newspapers, mail services, railroads, air- 
craft, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures — 
multiply the use of each and every one increases with 
one restriction : A new means of intercommunication 
paralleling but greatly improving an existing means 
will largely displace' it — as railroads have largely 
superseded canals. 

As a means of a particular and indispensable kind 
of intercommunication nothing has yet appeared 
that parallels and at the same time decidedly im- 
proves upon books. Newspapers and magazines do 
not and cannot, though they most nearly offer the 
same service. You cannot go in your Ford to hear 
from the lips of Mr. Tarkington his new novel and 
seeing it on the screen isn't the same thing as read- 
ing it — as we all know. And until some inventor 
enables us to sit down with an author and get his 
story whole, at our own convenience and related in 
his own words, by some device much more attrac- 
tive than reading a book, — why, until then books 
will be bought and read in steadily increasing num- 
bers. For with its exercise the taste for intercom- 
munication intensifies. To have been somewhere 
is to want to read about it, to have read about a 



170 Why Authors Go Wrong 

place is to want to go there in innumerable in- 
stances. It is a superficial view that sees in the 
spread of automobiles and motion pictures an ar- 
rest of reading. As time goes on and more and 
more people read books, both absolutely and rela- 
tively to the growth of populations, shall we hear 
a wail that people's habits have changed and that 
the spread of book-reading has checked the spread' 
of automobiling and lessened the attendance at the 
picture shows? Possibly we shall hear that out- 
cry but we doubt it; nor does our doubt rest upon 
any feeling that books will not be increasingly read. 



WRITING A NOVEL 



VIII 

WRITING A NOVEL 

THERE are at least as many ways of writing 
a novel as there are novelists and doubtless 
there are more; for it is to be presumed that every 
novelist varies somewhat in his methods of labor. 
The literature on the business of novel-writing is 
not extensive. Some observations and advice on 
the part of Mr. Arnold Bennett are, indeed, about 
all the average reader encounters; we have forgot- 
ten whether they are embedded in The Truth About 
An Author or in that other masterpiece, How to Live 
on 2,400 Words a Day. It may be remarked that 
there is no difficulty in living on 2,400 words a day, 
none at all, where the writer receives five cents a 
word or better. 

But there we go, talking about money, a shame- 
ful subject that has only a backstairs relation to 
Art. Let us ascend the front staircase together, 
first. Let us enter the parlor of Beauty-Is-Truth- 
Truth-Beauty, which, the poet assured us, is all we 
know or need to know. Let us seat ourselves in 
lovely aesthetic surroundings. If later we have to 

173 



174 Why Authors Go Wrong 



go out the back way maybe we can accomplish it 
unobserved. 

There are only three motives for writing a novel. 
The first is to satisfy the writer's self, the second 
is to please or instruct other persons, the third is 
to earn money. We will consider these motives in 
order. 



The best novels are written from a blending of 
all three motives. But it is doubtful if a good 
novel has ever been written in which the desire to 
satisfy some instinct in himself was not present 
in the writer's purpose. 

Just what this instinct is can't so easily be an- 
swered. Without doubt the greatest part of it 
is the instinct of paternity. Into the physiological 
aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though 
they are supported by a considerable body of evi- 
dence. The longing to father — or mother — certain 
fictitious characters is not often to be denied. 
Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is 
the beloved child of its author. Did not Dickens 
father Little Nell? How, do you suppose, Barrie 
has thought of himself in relation to some of his 
youngsters? Any one who has read Lore of Pro- 
serpine not only believes in fairies but understands 
the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of the 






Writing a Novel 175 

creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily 
parental. It is always intensely human. 

O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before 
the Big Brothers had been thought of), a father, 
an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere ac- 
quaintance, a sworn enemy of his people. It has 
to be so. For the writer lives among the people 
he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes him in- 
visible to them but he is always there — not to inter- 
fere with them nor to shape their destinies but to 
watch them come together or fly apart, to hear what 
they say, to guess what they think ( from what they 
say and from the way they behave), to worry over 
them, applaud them, frown; but forever as a re- 
corder. 



None of the authors troubles must appear in 
the finished record. Still wearing Fortunatus's cap 
he is required to be as invisible to the reader as to 
the people he describes. There are exceptions to 
this rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many 
readers prefer to have a tale told them by a narra- 
tor frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the 
characters and against others. Many — but not a 
majority. 

In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so 
far written, The Flirt, the dominating figure is a 
heartless young woman to whom the reader con- 



176 Why Authors Go Wrong 

tinuously itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal 
dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora 
Madison with boiling invective nor blister her with 
hot irony. He relates her doings in the main 
almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly 
they are more damnable than any amount of sound 
and fury could make them appear to be. Mr. 
Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle, 
though here and there, distilled through his narra- 
tive and perceptible more in the things he selects to 
tell about than in his manner of telling them, the 
reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blos- 
soms, signifying that the author has uncorked the 
acid bottle — perhaps that his restraint in not empty- 
ing it may be the more emphasized. 

May we set things down a little at random? 
Then let us seize this moment to point out to the 
intending novel writer some omissions in The Flirt. 
Our pupil will, when he comes to write his novel, 
be certain to think of the "strong scenes." He will 
be painfully eager to get them down. It is these 
scenes that will "grip" the reader and assure his 
book of a sale of 100,000 copies. 

Battle, murder and sudden death are generally 
held to be the very meat of a strong scene. But 
when the drunkard Ray Vilas, Cora Madison's dis- 
carded lover, shoots down Valentine Corliss and 
then kills himself, Mr. Tarkington does not fill 
pages with it. He takes scarce fifteen lines — per- 



Writing a Novel 177 

haps a little over 100 words — to tell of the double 
slaying. Nor does he relate what Ray Vilas and 
Cora said to each other in that last interview which 
immediately preceded the crime. "Probably," says 
Mr. Tarkington, "Cora told him the truth, all of 
it; though of course she seldom told quite the truth 
about anything in which she herself was concerned" 
— or words to that effect. 

Where oh where is the strong scene? Ah, one 
man's strength is another's weakness. The Flirt 
is full of strong scenes but they are infrequently the 
scenes which the intending novel writer, reviewing 
his tale before setting to work, would select as the 
most promising. 



Besides the instinct of paternity — or perhaps in 
place of it — the novelist may feel an instinct to 
build something, or to paint a beautiful picture, or 
mold a lovely figure. This yearning of the artist, 
so-called, is sometimes denoted by the word "self- 
expression," a misnomer, if it be not a euphuism, 
for the longing to fatherhood. There is just as 
much "self-expression" in the paternity of a boy 
or a girl as in the creation of a book, a picture or 
a building. The child, in any case, has innumer- 
able other ancestors; you are not the first to have 
written such a book or painted such a picture. 



178 Why Authors Go Wrong 

How about the second motive in novel-writing, 
the desire to please or instruct others? The only- 
safe generalization about it seems to be this: A 
novel written exclusively from this motive will be 
a bad novel. A novel is not, above everything, a 
didactic enterprise. Yet even those enterprises of 
the human race which are in their essence purely 
didactic, designed "to warn, to comfort, to com- 
mand," such as sermons and lessons in school, sel- 
dom achieve their greatest possible effect if instruc- 
tion or improvement be the preacher's or teacher's 
unadorned and unconcealed and only purpose. 

Take a school lesson. Teachers who get the 
best results are invariably found to have added 
some element besides bare instruction to their work. 
Sometimes they have made the lesson entertaining; 
sometimes they have exercised that imponderable 
thing we call "personal magnetism"; sometimes 
they have supplied an incentive to learn that didn't 
exist in the lesson itself. 

Take a sermon. If the auditor does not feel 
the presence in it of something besides the mere 
intelligence the words convey the sermon leaves the 
auditor cold. 

Pure intellect is not a force in human affairs. 
Bach wrote music with a very high intellectual con- 
tent but the small leaven of sublime melody is pres- 
ent in his work that lasts through the centuries. 
Shakespeare and Beethoven employed intellect and 



Writing a Novel 179 

emotionalism in the proportion of fifty-fifty. Sir 
Joshua Reynolds mixed his paint "with brains, sir" ; 
but the significant thing is that Sir Joshua did not 
use only gray matter on his palette. Those who 
economize on emotionalism in one direction usually 
make up for it, not always consciously, in another. 
Joseph Hergesheimer, writing Java Head, is very 
sparing in the emotionalism bound up with action 
and decidedly lavish in the emotionalism insepar- 
able from sensuous coloring and "atmosphere.' ' 

No, a novel written wholly to instruct will never 
do; but neither will a novel written entirely to 
please, to give aesthetic or sensuous enjoyment to 
the reader. Such a novel is like a portion of a fine 
French sauce — with nothing to spread it on. It is 
honey without a crust to dip. 



Writing a novel purely to make money has a 
tainted air, thanks to the long vogue of a false 
tradition. If so, The Vicar of Wakefield ought to 
be banished from public libraries; for Goldsmith 
needed the money and made no bones about saying 
so. The facts are, of course, unascertainable ; but 
we would be willing to wager, were there any way 
of deciding the bet, that more novels of the first 
rank have been written either solely or preponder- 



180 Why Authors Go Wrong 

antly to earn money than for any other reason 
whatever. • 

It isn't writing for the sake of the money that 
determines the merit of the result; that is settled 
by two other factors, the author's skill and the au- 
thor's conscience. And the word "skill" here 
necessarily includes each and every endowment the 
writer possesses as well as such proficiency as he 
may have acquired. 

Suppose A. and B. both to have material for a 
first-rate novel. Both are equally skilled in novel 
writing. Both are equally conscientious. A. writes 
his novel for his own satisfaction and to please and 
instruct others. He is careful and honest about it. 
He delights in it. B. writes his novel purely to 
make a few thousand dollars. He is, naturally, 
careful and honest in doing the job; and he prob- 
ably takes such pleasure in it as a man may take 
in doing well anything he can do well, from laying 
a sewer to flying an airplane. We submit that B.'s 
may easily be the better novel. It is true that B. 
is under a pressure that A. does not know and that 
B.'s work may be affected in ways of which he is 
not directly aware by the necessity to sell his fin- 
ished product. But most of the best work in the 
world is done under some compulsion or other; 
and it is the sum of human experience that the com- 
pulsion to do work which will find favor in the 
eyes of the worker's fellows is the healthfullest 



Writing a Novel 181 

compulsion of them all. Certainly it is more 
healthful than the compulsion merely to please 
yourself. And if B. is under a pressure A.'s dan- 
ger lies precisely in the fact that he is not under a 
pressure, or under too slight a pressure. It is a 
tenable hypothesis that Flaubert would have been 
a better novelist if he had had to make a living by 
his pen. Some indirect evidence on the point may 
possibly be found in the careers of certain writers 
whose first books were the product of a need to 
buy bread and butter; and whose later books were 
the product of no need at all — nor met any. 

So much for motives in novel-writing. You 
should write (i) because you need the money, (2) 
to satisfy your own instincts, and (3) to please and, 
perchance, instruct other persons. 

Take a week or two to get your motives in order 
and then, and not until then, read what follows, 
which has to do with how you are presently to pro- 
ceed about the business of writing your novel. 

6 

It is settled that you are going to write a novel. 
You have examined your motive and found it pure 
and worthy of you. Comes now the great question 
of how to set about the business. 

At this point let no one rise up and "point out" 
that Arnold Bennett has told how. Arnold Ben- 



1 82 Why Authors Go Wrong 



nett has told how to do everything — how to live on 
twenty-four hours a day (but not how to enjoy it), 
how to write books, how to acquire culture, how to 
be yourself and manage yourself (in the unfor- 
tunate event that you cannot be some one else or 
have no one, like a wife, to manage you), how to 
do everything, indeed, except rise up and call 
Arnold Bennett blessed. 

The trouble with Mr. Bennett's directions is — 
they won't work. 

Mr. Bennett tells you to write like everything and 
get as much of your novel done as possible before 
the Era of Discouragement sets in. Then, no mat- 
ter how great your Moment of Depression, you will 
be able to stand beside the table, fondly stroking a 
pile of pages a foot high, and reassure yourself, 
saying: "Well, but here, at least, is so much done. 
No! I cannot take my hand from the plough now! 
No! I must Go On. I must complete my des- 
tiny." (One's novel is always one's Destiny of 
the moment.) 

It sounds well, but the truth is that when you 
strike the Writer's Doldrums the sight of all that 
completed manuscript only enrages you to the last 
degree. You are embittered by the spectacle of so 
much effort wasted. You feel like tearing it up 
or flinging it in the wastebasket. If you are a 
Rudyard Kipling or an Edna Ferber, you do that 
thing. And your wife or your mother carefully re- 



Writing a Novel 183 

trieves your Recessional or your Dawn O'Hara and 
sends it to the publisher who brings it out, regard- 
less of expense, and sells a large number of copies 
— to the booksellers, anyway. 

Mr. Bennett also tells you how to plan the long, 
slow culminant movement of your novel; how to 
walk in the park and compose those neat little cli- 
maxes which should so desirably terminate each 

chapter; how to But what's the use? Let us 

illustrate with a fable. 

Once an American, meeting Mr. Bennett in Lon- 
don, saluted him, jocularly (he meant it jocularly) 
with the American Indian word of greeting: 
"How?" 

Mr. Bennett immediately began to tell him how 
and the American never got away until George H. 
Doran, the publisher, who was standing near by, 
exclaimed : 

"That's enough, Enoch, for a dollar volume !" 

(Mr. Doran, knowing Bennett well, calls him by 
his first name, a circumstance that should be pointed 
out to G. K. Chesterton, who would evolve a touch- 
ing paradox about the familiarity of the unfa- 
miliar.) 

That will do for Arnold. If we mention Arnold 
again it must distinctly be understood that we have 
reference to some other Arnold — Benedict Arnold 
or Matthew Arnold or Dorothy Arnold or Arnold 
Daly. 



1 84 Why Authors Go Wrong 

Well, to get back (in order to get forward), you 
are about beginning your novel (nice locution, 
"about beginning") and are naturally taking all the 
advice you can get, if it doesn't cost prohibitively, 
and this we are about to give doesn't. 

The first thing for you to do is not, necessarily, 
to decide on the subject of your novel. 

It is not absolutely indispensable to select the 
subject of a novel before beginning to write it. 
Many authors prefer to write a third or a half of 
the novel before definitely committing themselves 
to a particular theme. For example, take The Roll 
Call, by Arnold — it must have been Arnold Con- 
stable, or perhaps it was Matthew. The Roll Call 
is a very striking illustration of the point we would 
make. Somewhere along toward the end of The 
Roll Call the author decided that the subject of the 
novel should be the war and its effect on the son of 
Hilda Lessways by her bigamous first husband — 
or, he wasn't exactly her husband, being a bigamist, 
but we will let it go at that. Now Hilda Lessways 
was, or became, the wife of Edwin Clayhanger; 
and George Cannon, Clayhanger's — would you say, 
stepson? Hilda's son, anyway — George Cannon, 
the son of a gun — oh, pardon, the son of Biga- 
mist Cannon — the stepson of, or son of the 
wife of, Edwin Clayhanger of the Five Towns 
— George Cannon . . . Where were we? . . . 



Writing a Novel 185 

Hilda Lessways Clayhanger, the — well, wife — of 
Bigamist Cannon. . . . 

The relationships in this novel are very con- 
fusing, like the novel and the subject of it, but if 
you can read the book you will see that it illustrates 
our point perfectly. 



Well, go ahead and write. Don't worry about 
the subject. You know how it is, a person often 
can't see the forest for the trees. When you're 
writing 70,000 words or maybe a few more you 
can't expect to see your way out of 'em very easily. 
When you are out of the trees you can look back 
and see the forest. And when you are out of the 
woods of words you can glance over 'em and find 
out what they were all about. 

However, the 80,000 words have to be written, 
and it is up to you, somehow or other, to set down 
the 90,000 parts of speech in a row. Now 100,000 
words cannot be written without taking thought. 
Any one who has actually inscribed 120,000 words 
knows that. Any one who has written the 150,000 
words necessary to make a good-sized novel 
(though William Allen White wouldn't call that 
good measure) understands the terrible difficulties 
that confront a mortal when he sits down to enter 
upon the task of authorship, the task of putting on 



1 86 Why Authors Go Wrong 

paper the 200,000 mono- or polysyllables that shall 
hold the reader breathless to the end, if only from 
the difficulty of pronouncing some of them. 

Where to start? For those who are not yet 
equipped with self-starters we here set down a few 
really first-class openings for either the spring or 
fall novel trade: 

"Marinda was frightened. When she was 
frightened her eyes changed color. They were 
dark now, and glittering restlessly like the sea when 
the wind hauls northwest. Jack Hathaway, unfa- 
miliar with weather signs, took no heed of the im- 
pending squall. He laughed recklessly, dangerous- 
ly. . . ." (Story of youth and struggle.) 

"The peasant combed the lice from his beard, 
spat and said, grumbling : 'Send us ploughs that we 
may till the soil and save Russia. . . . Send us 
ploughs.' " (Realistic story of Russia.) 

"Darkness, suave, dense, enfolding, lay over the 
soft loam of the fields. The girl, moving silently 
across the field, felt the mystery of the dark; the 
scent of the soil and the caress of the night alike 
enchanted her. Hidden in the folds of her dress, 
clutched tightly in her fingers, was the ribbon he 
had given her. With a quick indrawing of her 
breath she paused, and, screened by the utter black- 
ness that enveloped her, pressed it to her lips. . . ." 
(Story of the countryside. Simple, trusting inno- 
cence. Lots of atmosphere. After crossing the 



Writing a Novel 187 

field the girl strikes across Haunted Heath, a 
description of which fills the second chapter.) 

All these are pretty safe bets, if you're terribly 
hard up. Think them over. Practise them daily 
for a few weeks. 

8 

Now that you have some idea about writing a 
novel it may be as well for you to consider the con- 
sequences before proceeding to the irrevocable act. 

One of the consequences will certainly be the dis- 
covery of many things in the completed manuscript 
that you never intended. This is no frivolous 
allusion to the typographical errors you will find 
— for a typewriter is as capable of spoonerisms as 
the human tongue. We have reference to things 
that you did not consciously put into your narra- 
tive. 

And first let it be said that many things that 
seem to you unconscious in the work of skilled 
writers are deliberate art (as the phrase goes). 
The trouble is that the deliberation usually spoils 
the art. An example must be had and we will take 
it in a novel by the gifted American, Joseph 
Hergesheimer. Before proceeding further with 
this Manual for Beginners read Java Head if you 
can; if not, never mind. 

Now in Java Head the purpose of Mr. Herges- 
heimer was, aside from the evocation of a beautiful 



1 88 Why Authors Go Wrong 

bit of a vanished past, the delineation of several 
persons of whom one represented the East 
destroyed in the West and another the West 
destroyed in the East. Edward Dunsack, back in 
Salem, Massachusetts, the victim of the opium 
habit, represented the West destroyed in the East; 
the Chinese wife of Gerrit Ammidon represented 
the East destroyed in the West. Mr. Herges- 
heimer took an artist's pride in the fact that the 
double destruction was accomplished with what 
seemed to him the greatest possible economy of 
means; almost the only external agency employed, 
he pointed out, was opium. Very well; this is 
sestheticism, pure and not so simple as it looks. 
It is a Pattern. It is a musical phrase or theme 
presented as a certain flight of notes in the treble, 
repeated or echoed and inverted in the bass. It is 
a curve on one side of a staircase balanced by a 
curve on the other. It is a thing of symmetry and 
grace and it is the expression, perfect in its way, 
of an idea. Kipling expressed very much the same 
idea when he told us that East is East and West 
is West and never the twain shall meet. Mr. 
Hergesheimer amplifies and extends. If the two 
are brought in contact each is fatal to the other. 
Is that all? 

It is not all, it is the mere beginning. When 
you examine Java Head with the Pattern in mind 
you immediately discover that the Pattern is car- 



Writing a Novel 189 

ried out in bewildering detail. Everything is sym- 
metrically arranged. For instance, many a reader 
must have been puzzled and bewildered by the 
heartbreaking episode at the close of the novel in 
which Roger Brevard denies the delightful girl 
Sidsall Ammidon. The affair bears no relation to 
the currents of the tale; it is just a little eddy to 
one side; it is unnecessarily cruel and wounding to 
our sensibilities. Why have it at all ? 

The answer is that in his main narrative Mr. 
Hergesheimer has set before us Gerrit Ammidon, 
a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice out of 
sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic 
scroll of such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched 
on shore. Well, then, down in the corner, he must 
inscribe for us another contrasting, balancing, 
compensating, miniatured scroll — a land-shape in 
the person of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic 
as to offset Gerrit Ammidon completely. Gerrit 
Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons 
and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for 
the most compelling of reasons — love. The beauti- 
ful melody proclaimed by the violins is brutally 
parodied by the tubas. 



Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and 
it never can be so long as life remains the unpat- 



190 Why Authors Go Wrong 

terned thing we discern it to be. If life were com- 
pletely patterned it would most certainly not be 
worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned 
we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its 
patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are 
there, because it comforts us to think of a funda- 
mental Order and Symmetry). 

But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so 
long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is 
eager, interesting, surprising and altogether dis- 
tracting and lovely however bewildering and dis- 
tressing, too. Different people take the unreadable 
differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in 
defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph 
Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. 
Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom; 
Conrad admires the design that he can only in- 
completely trace. To Hardy the world is a place 
where — 

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ; 
They kill us for their sport.' ' 

To Conrad the world is a place where men may 
continually make the glorious and heartening dis- 
covery that a solidarity exists among them; that 
they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is 
mysterious. 

And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Herges- 
heimer writing Java Head, the world is a place 



Writing a Novel 191 

where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual 
symmetries without thought of their relation to an 
ineluctable whole. 

10 

What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not 
obvious that he must not busy himself too carefully 
with the business of patterning the things he has 
to tell ? For the moment he has traced everything 
out nicely and beautifully he may know for a 
surety that he has cut himself off from the larger 
design of Life. He has got his little corner of the 
Oriental rug all mapped out with the greatest ex- 
actitude. But he has lost touch with the bigger 
intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He 
had better kneel down and pray. 

Now there are novels in which no pattern at all 
is traced; and these are as bad as those which 
minutely map a mere corner. These are meaning- 
less and confused stories in which nobody can 
discern any cause or effect, any order or law, any 
symmetry or proportion or expressed idea. These 
are the novels which have been justified as a "slice 
of life" and which have brought into undeserved 
disrepute the frequently painstaking manner of 
their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily, as 
so many people think, with the material but with 
its presentation. You may take almost any ma- 
terial you like and so present it as to make it mean 



192 Why Authors Go Wrong 

something; and you may also take almost any 
material you like and so present it as to make it 
mean nothing to anybody. A heap of bricks is 
meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible 
expressed as a building of whatever sort, or merely 
as a sidewalk with zigzags, perhaps, of a vari- 
color. 

The point we would make — and we might as 
well try to drive it home without further ineffectual 
attempts at illustration — is that you must do some 
patterning with your material, whether bricks for 
a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern 
too preciously your building will be contemptible 
and your story without a soul. In your building 
you must not be so decided as to leave no play for 
another's imagination, contemplating the structure. 
In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic 
about two and two adding to four as to leave no 
room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came 
to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two 
have always made four but the possibility that 
some day they may make five that makes life worth 
living — and guessing about on the printed page. 

ii 

Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing 
a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably 
entails. 



Writing a Novel 193 

We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery 
you will make of the size of your own soul. We 
have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others. 

Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself 
when you write a book to reveal others to others. 
It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do 
a thing which does not expose his nature. This is 
nonsense; you do not expose your nature every 
time you take the subway, though a trip therein 
may very well be an index to your manners. The 
fact remains that no man ever made a book or a 
play or a song or a poem, with any command of the 
technique of his work, without in some measure 
giving himself away. Where this is not enough 
of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle 
with every bound copy, is offered ; no small addition 
as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, 
that "this story is not to be whistled down the 
wind." Some have doubted Bernard Shaw's Irish- 
ism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything 
he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed 
between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of 
Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a 
book called Penny of Top Hill Trail. He might 
be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have 
coppered his risk in publishing it. . . . All of 
which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us 
therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost 
seriousness. 



194 Why Authors Go Wrong 

The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the 
mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may 
naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very 
likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, 
a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon 
our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so 
high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful 
disappointments on finding out where we actually 
get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our 
ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart 
with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after 
completing The Picture of Dorian Grey! And 
imagine the lift it must have given him to look 
within himself as he worked at The Ballad of Read- 
ing Gaol! The circumstances of life and even the 
actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or 
there — or anywhere at all — in this intimate con- 
templation. There is one mirror before which we 
never pose. God made man in His own image. 
God made His own image and put it in every man. 

It is there! Nothing in life transcends the 
wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we 
make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to 
remold ourselves nearer to our heart's desire. It 
succeeds or it doesn't; perhaps it succeeds only 
slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twist- 
ing and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the 
perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours 
of our whole earthly existence. Because they have 



Writing a Novel 195 

seen this some have thought life no better than a 
nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and 
all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a 
god on some other planet. We would point out 
the bright side of this possibility : It presupposes 
the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious 
and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of 
Caesar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft, 
violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Hitch Tchaikovski, 
Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and 
Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps 
Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely 
eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, 
may well explain the whole confused universe. 
And you and I — we can create another universe, 
equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night ! . . . 
You see there is a bright side to everything, for the 
mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor. 

We were saying, when sidetracked by the neces- 
sity of explaining the universe, that the self -revela- 
tion which .writing a book entails is in most cases 
depressing, but not by any means always so. Bos- 
well was not much of a man judged by the stand- 
ards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Bos- 
well knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson 
by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. 
It must have bucked him up immensely to know 
that he was at least big enough himself to measure 
a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross 



196 Why Authors Go Wrong 



and sideways, setting down the complicated result 
without any error that the human intelligence can 
detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of 
Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the 
very few men who had never fooled himself about 
himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal 
achievement in the shape of the book The Educa- 
tion of Henry Adams, would survive him after his 
death — or at least, after the difficulties of com- 
municating with those on earth had noticeably in- 
creased (we make this wise modification lest some- 
one match Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, or Life 
After Death with a volume called Henry, or Re- 
Education After Death). 

It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the 
by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad 
when he discovered, on completing Nostromo, that 
he had a profounder insight into the economic bases 
of modern social and political affairs than nine- 
tenths of the professional economists and sociolo- 
gists — plus a knowledge of the human heart that 
they have never dreamed worth while. For Con- 
rad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the "silver of 
the mine" of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, 
an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter 
the corruptible nature of man — and would continue 
to do so through generation after generation long 
after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become 
dust. 






Writing a Novel 197 

Even in the case of the humble and unknown 
writer whose completed manuscript, after many 
tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to 
be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief 
not so much in the work itself as in what it was 
meant to express and so evidently failed to — even 
in his case the great consolation is the attestation 
of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the 
artist in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, voicing 
with clarity and beauty the belief in which they 
think they have lived or ought to have lived ; but a 
piece of work is always an actual living of some part 
of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but 
it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality 
of the deed done, which men have always admired, 
and because of which they have invented those 
things we call words to embody their praise. 

But what of the consequences of revealing your- 
self to others? Writing a novel will surely mean 
that you will incur them. We must speak of them 
briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for 
which you are doubtless waiting with terrible pa- 
tience — the way to write the novel itself. Never 
fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall 
Know All. 

12 

"Certainly, publish everything," commented the 
New York Times editorially upon a proposal to 



198 Why Authors Go Wrong 



give out earnings, or some other detail, of private 
businesses. "All privacy is scandalous," added the 
newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ulti- 
mate justification for writing a novel. 

All privacy is scandalous. If you don't believe 
it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. A Por- 
trait of The Artist As a Young Man will do for a 
starter. Ulysses is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes 
the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the 
open street. You see, nothing but a sincere con- 
viction concerning the wickedness of leaving any- 
thing at all unmentioned in public could justify 
such narratives as Mr. Joyce's. 

In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy 
is what underlies any novel of what we generally 
call the "realistic" sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance, 
thinks it scandalous that we should not know and 
publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as 
Hurstwood in his Sister Carrie. Mr. Hardy thinks 
it scandalous that the world should not publicly 
acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and 
therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the 
subtitle says, "faithfully presented." Gene Strat- 
ton-Porter thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth 
about such a boy as Freckles. The much- 
experienced Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow 
by what seems almost a world conspiracy to con- 
done the insufferable conceit of the George 
Amberson Minafers among us, writes The Mag- 



Writing a Novel 199 



nificent Amber sons to make us confess how we hate 
'em — and how our instinctive faith in them is 
vindicated at last. 

Every novelist who gains a public of any size or 
permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces 
the consequences of the revelation of himself to 
some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don't 
mean that he always delineates himself in the per- 
son of a character, or several characters, in his 
stories. He may do that, of course, but the self- 
exposure is generally much more merciless. The 
novelist can withhold from the character which, 
more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities. 
What he cannot withhold from the reader is his 
own mind's limitations. 

A novel is bounded by the author's horizons. If 
a man can see only so far and only so deep his 
book will show it. If he cannot look abroad, but 
can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face, 
that fact will be fully apparent to his co-spectators 
who turn the pages of his story. If he can see 
only certain colors those who look on with him will 
be aware of his defect. Above all, if he can see 
persons as all bad or all good, all black or all white, 
he will be hanged in effigy along with the puppets 
he has put on paper. 

This is the reason why every one should write 
a novel. There is only one thing comparable with 
it as a means of self-immolation. That, of course, 



200 Why Authors Go Wrong 



is tenure of public office. And as there are not 
nearly enough public offices to serve the need of 
individual discipline, novelizing should be encour- 
aged, fomented — we had almost said, made com- 
pulsory. Compulsion, however, defeats its own 
ends. Let us elect to public offices, as we would 
choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot, 
through some misfortune, write novels; and let us 
induce all the other people in the world that we can 
to put pen to paper — not that they may enrich the 
world with immortal stories, not that they may 
make money, become famous or come to know 
themselves, but solely that we may know them for 
what they are. 

If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a 
novel would we have made him a Congressman 
and would President Wilson have made him Post- 
master-General? If William, sometime of Ger- 
many, had written a novel would the Germans have 
acquiesced in his theory of Divine Right ? Georges 
Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the 
people to lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli 
and Rider Haggard and Arnold Bennett have 
written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty 
accurately — and not one of them has yet been in- 
vited to help run the League of Nations. The 
reason is simple : We know them too well. 

All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says: 
"It is positively immoral that the world should 



Writing a Novel 201 

run on without knowing the depths to which I can 
sink. I must write The Way of a Man and make 
the world properly contemptuous of me." Zona 
Gale reflects to herself : "After all, with nothing but 
these few romances and these Friendship Village 
stories, people have no true insight into my real 
tastes, affinities, predilections, qualities of mind. 
I will write about a fruit and pickle salesman, an 
ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost in- 
voluntarily, a paperhanger. That will give them 
the idea of me they lack." 

William Allen White, without consciously think- 
ing anything of the kind, is dimly aware that ( peo- 
ple generally have a right to know him as a big- 
hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose 
sympathy is with the individual man and woman 
and whose passion is for social progress. The best 
way to make people generally acquainted with 
William Allen White is to write a novel — say, 
In The Heart of a Fool, which they will read. . . . 
The best way to get to know anybody is to get him 
to talking about somebody else. Talk about one's 
self is a little too self-conscious. 

And there you have it! It is exactly because 
such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty 
nearly always talking about himself that we find it 
so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of 
his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent 
from a Wells book. It is this acute self-conscious- 



202 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ness that makes so much of Henry James valueless 
to the great majority of readers. They cannot get 
past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr. 
James is dead, and the only way left to get at the 
truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor 
of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British repub- 
lic, Secretary of Un-War. . . . 

Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write 
That Novel. Don't procrastinate, don't temporize. 
Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of 
words into action in all countries, including the 
Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the 
actual writing follow. 

You may not have noticed it, but even so suc- 
cessful a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is care- 
ful to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn't 
it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into 
account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels 
does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three 
Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the 
time, the place and the girl. 

If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. 
Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write 
your first novel, had better attend to it also. 

Now, to work ! About a title. Better have one, 
even if it's only provisional, before you begin to 



Writing a Novel 203 

write. If you can, get the real, right title at the 
outset. Sometimes having it will help you through 
— not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell 
Abbott's. The author of Molly Make-Believe, The 
Sick-a-Bed Lady and Old-Dad gets her real, right 
title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like 
a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the 
same. We have three corking titles for as many 
novels. One is written. The other two we haven't 
to worry about. They have only to live up to their 
titles, which may be difficult for them but will make 
it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard. 
Everything that lives up to the promise of our 
superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to 
it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add 
parenthetically, was the original motive in institut- 
ing titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. 
Very well, it was expected that he would conform 
his character and conduct accordingly. Things 
suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and 
do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he 
would kindly omit. ... It works better with books 
than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will 
come out more satisfactorily than you think. 

Which brings us to the matter of the ending. 
Should it be happy or otherwise? More words 
have been wasted on this subject than on any other 
aspect of fictioneering. You must understand 
from the very first that you, personally, have noth- 



204 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ing whatever to say about the ending of your story. 
That will be decided by the people of your tale and 
the events among which they live. In other words, 
the preponderant force in determining the ending 
is — inevitability. 

Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others 
merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow's 
weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask 
anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the in- 
evitable come off hot, so that an overcoat will be 
a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather 
forecaster in Washington. If there were a corre- 
sponding official whose duty it would be to forecast 
with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life 
would go on much the same. Readers would still 
worry about the last page because they would know 
that the official prediction would be wrong at least 
half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophe- 
sied: "Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain 
probably killed in train accident" we would go 
drearily forward confident that page 378 would dis- 
close the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in 
the villain's arms while the hero lay prone under a 
stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the car- 
buretor didn't carburete. 

Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Hered- 
ity can be rigorously controlled — novelists are the 
real eugenists — but inevitability is like natural se- 
lection or the origin of species or mutations or O. 



Writing a Novel 205 

Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. En- 
vironment has little in common with inevitability. 
In the pages of any competent novelist the girl in 
the slums will sooner or later disclose her posses- 
sion of the most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her 
innocence will become even more manifest than 
her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue, 
whose earliest environment included orange spoons 
and Etruscan pottery, will turn out to be a lowdown 
brute. Environment is what we want it to be, in- 
evitability is what we are. 

You think, of course, that you can pre-determine 
the outcome of this story you are going to write. 
Yes, you can ! You can no more pre-determine the 
ending than you can pre-determine the girl your 
son will marry. It's exactly like that. For you 
must come face to face, before you have written 
50 pages of your book, with an appalling and in- 
spiring Fact. You might as well face it here. 

14 

The position of the novelist engaged in writing 
a novel can only be indicated by a shocking exag- 
geration which is this : He is not much better than 
a medium in a trance. 

Now of course such a statement calls for the most 
exact explanation. Nobody can give it. Such a 
statement calls for indisputable evidence. None ex- 



206 Why Authors Go Wrong 

ists. Such a statement, unexplained and unsup- 
ported by testimony, is a gross and unscientific as- 
sumption not even worthy to be damned by being 
called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the 
thing's so. 

We, personally, having written a novel — or may- 
be two — know what we are talking about. The 
immense and permanent curiosity of people all over 
the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon 
the question, in respect of the novelist: "How 
does he write ?" As Mary S. Watts remarks, that 
is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He 
doesn't know himself. But though it is the one 
thing the novelist can't tell you it is not one of 
those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward, 
no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by 
writing a novel. 

And to write one you need little beyond a few 
personalities firmly in mind, a typewriter and lots 
of white paper. An outline is superfluous and 
sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the 
machine and write the title, in capital letters. Be- 
low, write: "By Theophrastus Such," or whatever 
you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in 
bad taste, to call yourself. Begin. 

You will have the first few pages, the opening 
scene, possibly the first chapter, fairly in mind ; you 
may have mental notes on one or two things your 



Writing a Novel 207 

people will say. Beyond that you have only the 
haziest idea of what it will all be about. Write. 

As you write it will come to you. Somehow. 
What do you care how? Let the psychologists 
stew over that. 

They, in all probability, will figure out that the 
story has already completely formed itself, in all 
its essentials and in many details, in your subcon- 
scious mind, the lowermost cellar of your uninter- 
esting personality where moth and rust do not cor- 
rupt, whatever harm they may do higher up, and 
where the cobwebs lie even more thickly than in 
your alleged brain. As you write, and as the re- 
sult of the mere act of writing, the story, lying 
dormant in your subcellar, slowly shakes a leg, 
quivers, stretches, extends itself to its full length, 
yawns, rises with sundry anatomical contortions 
and advancing crosses the threshold of your sub- 
consciousness into the well-dusted and cleaned base- 
ment of your consciousness whence it is but a step 
to full daylight and the shadow of printed black 
characters upon a to-and-fro travelling page. 

In other words, you are an automaton ; and to be 
an automaton in this world of exuberant originality 
is a blissful thing. 

Your brain is not engaged at all. This is why 
writing fiction actually rests the brain. It is why 
those who are suffering from brain-fag find recrea- 
tion and enjoyment, health and mental strength in 



208 Why Authors Go Wrong 



writing a short story or a novel. The short story 
is a two weeks' vacation for the tired mind. Writ- 
ing a novel is a month, with full pay. It is true 
that readers are rather prone to resent the wide- 
spread habit of novelists recuperating and recover- 
ing their mental faculties at their readers' expense. 
This resentment is without any justification in fact, 
since for every novelist who recovers from brain- 
fag by writing a work of fiction there are thousands 
of readers who restore their exhausted intellects 
with a complete rest by reading the aforesaid work 
of fiction. 

Of course the subconscious cellar theory of novel- 
writing is not final and authoritative. There is at 
least one other tenable explanation of how novels 
are written, and we proceed to give it. 

This is that the story is projected through the 
personality of the writer who is, in all respects, no 
more than a mechanism and whose role may be 
accurately compared to that of a telephone trans- 
mitter in a talk over the wire. 

This theory has the important virtue of explain- 
ing convincingly all the worst novels, as well as all 
the best. For a telephone transmitter is not re- 
sponsible for what is spoken into it or for what it 
transmits. It is not to blame for some very silly 
conversations. It has no merit because it forwards 
some very wise words. Similarly, if the novelist is 
merely a transmitter, a peculiarly delicate and sen- 



Writing a Novel 209 



sitive medium for conveying what is said and done 
somewhere else, perhaps on some other plane by 
some other variety of mortals, the novelist is in no 
wise to blame for the performances or utterances of 
his characters, or clients as they ought, in this view, 
to be called ; the same novelist might, and probably 
would, be the means of transmitting the news of 
splendid deeds and the superb utterances of glorious 
people, composing one story, and the inanities, ver- 
bal or otherwise, of a lot of fourth dimensional 
Greenwich Villagers, constituting another and in- 
finitely inferior story. ... To be sure this explan- 
ation, which relieves the novelist of almost all re- 
sponsibility for his novels, ought also to take from 
him all the credit for good work. If he is a pain- 
fully conscientious mortal he may grieve for years 
over this; but if his first or his second or his third 
book sells 100,000 copies he will probably be will- 
ing, in the words of the poet, to take the cash and 
let the credit go. Very greedy men invariably in- 
sist on not merely taking the cash but claiming the 
credit as well; saintly men clutch at the credit and 
instruct their publishers that all author's royalties 
are to be made over to the Fund for Heating the 
Igloos of Aged and Helpless Eskimos. But the 
funny thing about the whole business is that the 
world, which habitually withholds credit where 
credit is due, at other times insists on bestowing 
credit anyway. There have been whole human 



210 Why Authors Go Wrong 

philosophies based upon the principle of Renuncia- 
tion and even whole novels, such as those of Henry 
James. But it doesn't work. Renounce, if you 
like, all credit for the books which bear your name 
on the title-page. The world will weave its laurel 
wreath and crown you with bays just the same. 
Men have become baldheaded in a single night in 
the effort to avoid unmerited honor and by noon 
the next day have looked as if they were bacchantes 
or at least hardy perennials, so thick have been the 
vine leaves in their hair, or rather on the site of it. 

. . . Which takes us away from our subject. 
Where were we? Oh, yes, about writing your 
novel. . . . 

As soon as you have done two or three days' 
stint on the book — you ought to plan to write so 
many words a day or a week, and it's no matter 
that you don't know what they will be — as soon 
as you've got a fairish start you will find that you 
have several persons in your story who are, to all 
intents and purposes, as much alive as yourself and 
considerably more self-willed. They will promptly 
take the story in their hands and you will have 
nothing to do in the remaining 50,000 words or 
more but to set down what happens. The extreme 
physical fatigue consequent upon writing so many 
words is all you have to guard against. Play golf 
or tennis, if you can, so as to offset this physical 
fatigue by the physical rest and intellectual exer- 



Writing a Novel 211 

cise they respectively afford. Auction bridge in the 
evenings, or, as Frank M. O'Brien says, reading 
De Morgan and listening to the phonograph, will 
give you the emotional outlet you seek. 



15 

No doubt many who have read the foregoing will 
turn up their noses at the well-meant advice it con- 
tains, considering that we have largely jested on a 
serious subject. We take this occasion to declare 
most earnestly, at the conclusion of our remarks, 
that we have seldom been so serious in our life. 
Such occasional levities as we have allowed our- 
selves to indulge in have been plain and obvious, 
and of no more importance in the general scheme 
of what we have been discussing than the story 
of the Irishman with which the gifted after-dinner 
speaker circumspectly introduces his most burning 
thoughts. 

We mean what we have said. Writing a novel 
is one of the most rounded forms of self -education. 
It is one of the most honorable too, since, unlike the 
holder of public office, the person who is getting 
the education does not do so at the public expense. 
We have regard, naturally, to the mere act of writ- 
ing the novel. If afterward it finds a publisher and 
less probably a public — that has nothing to do with 
the author, whose self-culture, intensive, satisfying 



! [ 



212 Why Authors Go Wrong 

and wholesome, has been completed before that 
time. 

Whether a novelist deserves any credit for the 
novel he writes is a question, but he will get the 
credit for it anyway and nothing matters where 
so wonderful an experience is to be gained. Next 
to being hypnotized, there is nothing like it; and 
it has the great advantage that you know what you 
are doing whereas the hypnotic subject does not. 
No preparation is necessary or even desirable since, 
even in so specific a detail as the outline of the 
story the people of your narrative take things en- 
tirely in their own hands and reduce the outline to 
the now well-known status of a scrap of paper. . . . 
We talk of "advice" in writing a novel. The best 
advice is not to take any. 



THE END 



